Inside an explosion of cyber crime in brokered-freight networks, with DAT's Jeff Hopper

For this edition of Overdrive Radio, DAT Freight and Analytics' Chief Marketing Officer Jeff Hopper, who’s been with the company now for decades, notes the undeniable spike in double brokering, in identity theft and hop-in, hop-out "take the money and run" and other schemes that has led to a doubling of staff in DAT’s compliance department as well as a host of other in-process security enhancements there: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15542218/dat-steps-up-fight-against-freight-fraud-but-is-it-enough

DAT's not alone, of course -- competitors at Truckstop.com have been doing similar things when it comes ID’ing the various types of “bad behavior” and working with the good guys out there to put a stop to it where possible, in no small part thanks to the efforts of a myriad of small business truckers to raise the temperature around the issue of double brokering and other fraud: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15541639/the-third-parties-following-truckers-around-freight-networks

Among those is Matthew Patrick, with GMH Transportation. Regular readers may recall his two-part "The double-brokering slow burn" at OverdriveOnline.com a couple weeks back: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-extra/article/15543642/double-brokering-scourge-how-it-works-how-to-fight-back

The stories outlined a year and more’s worth of efforts undertaken to identify some of the bad actors and take action to get them removed from the platforms where they ply their “trade.’ DAT’s Jeff Hopper in today’s episode of Overdrive Radio called it all organized cyber crime, really.

Before our talk with Hopper featured in this episode, we share a particular case that Patrick sent along earlier this week at about the same time we were getting ready to talk to Hopper. The case involved two different examples in which two different brokers’ loads were double-brokered by a single entity, the “Cheetah Import and Export” broker, MC# 1477261.

What stood out to Patrick was that in each double-brokered load case, Cheetah offered considerably more to move the load than what the original brokers offered a carrier, suggestive of a company in what Patrick calls the “take the money run” phase of a double broker’s evolution. You know the story if you’ve read Overdrive over years now -- run up as much in revenue as you can, stiff all the carriers, and disappear into the ether when the bond is cashed and canceled: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/14897461/broker-scams-owneroperators-and-fleets-need-to-be-aware-of

Over the course of the last few days, it looks like that particular broker’s bond company has notified the feds of impending cancelation -- a bond that was effective starting in early August this year is now set to cancel September 29, flagged in FMCSA’s Licensing and Insurance public portal as such.

We called the bond company the morning of Friday, September 1, and they noted five claims for nonpayment already, the largest of the claims for $5,000. Attempts to contact the broker by phone for comment yielded only a day’s-long busy signal. Email then sent to the entity's primary contact laid out all of these details and asked if the company planned to respond to claims on the bond. That gleaned only a short response in an unsigned return email from a rep with the display name "Gevork Sulian":

“What are you talking about? What happened? We are 1 year in this industry and never had a problem with our carriers.”

As far as Matt Patrick knows, despite having filed complaints against this particular company, they were still able to post loads on DAT as of Friday. DAT reps assured that that they are investigating the complaints, but be forewarned if this company comes calling, or you run across any company’s overly high rates on the boards. Scams abound, as Jeff Hopper further emphasizes in today’s edition of Overdrive Radio.