Combatting Fraud in Trucking: Five Team Workflows

1. Establish the Contact Before Sharing the Load

Record how your team confirmed the company contact and who is handling the shipment. If someone new requests instructions, verify their role before treating the request as authorized. Keep the verified contact accessible to staff covering the shipment later.

2. Approve Pickup Changes Explicitly

Create one process for driver, truck, trailer, carrier, and destination changes. Specify what needs review and who can approve it. Send the approved information to the facility before release when possible. Record the reason for the change and the person who made the decision.

3. Connect Alerts to Follow-Up

Choose an owner for each type of shipment exception. CargoGuard supports arrival, departure, delivery, delay, and potential GPS-manipulation alerts, with email, SMS, and custom escalation rules. Decide which issues need customer communication and when a backup reviewer should step in.

4. Keep Payment Approval Separate

A person handling a delayed truck may feel pressure to resolve a payment request quickly. Preserve the finance review even when operations are urgent. FBI guidance on business email compromise recommends verifying payment changes independently. A tracking update is not authorization to change a payee.

5. Preserve an Understandable Record

Keep the tender, approved changes, messages, photos, and delivery documents together. Mark uncertain details as uncertain. If an incident occurs, a chronological record helps your team explain its decisions and respond to requests for information.

Practice the Handoff

Use a clearly hypothetical exercise with your team: a replacement truck arrives while the usual dispatcher is unavailable. Ask staff where they find the approved details, whom they contact, and what they record. The exercise tests the procedure; it is not a customer case study or evidence of reduced losses.

Where CargoGuard Supports the Process

Driver checks, pickup photos, five-second GPS tracking, alerts, and document capture give staff information to review. CargoGuard does not automatically establish that a shipment is legitimate or that every participant is authorized. See the features overview and trucking scams article for related workflows.

Use Official Resources When Needed

The FMCSA broker and carrier fraud page provides prevention and reporting guidance. If something looks wrong, preserve the evidence and involve the appropriate shipment parties and reporting contacts. Review facts before making accusations or drawing conclusions about responsibility.