Freight Fraud Statistics for 2026

A freight brokerage checks a carrier properly once. When the carrier is onboarded, someone on the carrier team pulls its operating authority, its insurance certificate and its safety record into a file, and from then on the loads go out by email and phone to whoever answers for that carrier.

The checking still takes hours every day. And when a load goes to the wrong people anyway, the broker is the one left explaining it to the shipper.

The 2025 and 2026 numbers show where that routine breaks.

The average stolen load is worth more than it was two years ago while the count of incidents has held flat or fallen, and most of the loads reported stolen to Highway, a carrier-verification network, now leave on a real carrier's identity in the wrong hands: a hijacked inbox, a bought authority, or a carrier that passed every check and then took the freight.

A check run once at onboarding sees none of the three.

This page gives each number with who counted it, then the check those numbers call for: the carrier's identity confirmed again at every tender and at every change before delivery, which is the job we build an AI agent to do on its own.

Every figure here comes from a network or a survey that counts what was reported to it, so none of them is a census of the industry.

Cargo Theft Losses Rose 60% in 2025 on Almost the Same Number of Incidents

Verisk CargoNet runs a theft-reporting network that the freight and insurance industries share with law enforcement in the US and Canada. It recorded 3,594 supply chain crime incidents in 2025 against 3,607 in 2024, and estimated the losses at nearly $725 million, up 60%.¹ Confirmed cargo thefts within those incidents rose 18%, to 2,646.¹

The money moved because the loads did. The average theft was worth $273,990 in 2025, up 36% in a year.¹

The second quarter of 2026 widened the gap. CargoNet counted 677 incidents, 26% fewer than a year earlier, and estimated losses of $304.6 million, more than double the $135.7 million of the second quarter of 2025.⁶ A few multimillion-dollar thefts did much of that.⁶ For a broker the shape matters more than the total: fewer incidents, with more of the loss riding on each one.

The FBI's April 2026 alert on cargo theft uses the same 2025 figures,⁷ so that is one count, not two.

For double brokering, the only estimate with a publisher's name on it is TriumphPay's, from 2023: it put the freight affected at $500 million to $700 million a year.⁸

The figure of more than $800 million a year that vendor blogs credit to the FBI does not appear in the FBI's own alert.

Most Loads Reported Stolen to Highway Left on a Real Carrier's Identity

Highway, which sells carrier identity verification to brokers, publishes a quarterly index of the fraud reported to it. Its report for the third quarter of 2026 sorts the stolen loads by how the thieves reached the freight, and its own caveat is that it describes activity reported to Highway, not the whole industry.³

Three routes accounted for more than 80% of the loads reported stolen to Highway in the third quarter,³ and each one runs through an identity a broker had already checked:

Compromised communications: 40.2%.³ Someone controls the carrier's real email or phone, so the thread looks like every earlier load.

Direct theft by the carrier: 36.4%.³ The carrier you booked takes the freight itself, and in Highway's cases some took several loads within a few days.³

A bought authority: 7.1%, down from 21.1% in the second quarter.³ The company's name, number and history stay the same; the people behind them change.

On September 29, 2026, a federal jury in Los Angeles convicted two men who had bought or misused real trucking companies, one of them for about $22,000, booked loads through brokers and never delivered them; prosecutors put the loss at no less than $2 million.⁹

The FMCSA tells carriers not to sell or buy a USDOT or MC number outside a legitimate corporate transaction.¹⁰ CargoNet describes criminal networks doing both: buying carriers outright, and harvesting carriers' email, phone and load-board logins so they can work as the carrier.¹¹

Tighter Registration Pushed Fraud Toward Carriers You Already Trust

On May 19, 2026, the FMCSA moved registration to a new system, Motus,¹² where every user verifies their identity to log in,¹³ and the agency says Motus will randomize newly issued USDOT and docket numbers to help prevent fraud.¹⁴

In the second quarter Highway saw fake identities created from scratch decline as registration controls tightened.¹⁵

CargoNet's numbers show the same move on a different network. Between the second quarter of 2025 and the second quarter of 2026, incidents it classified as theft fell from 488 to 378, while fictitious pickups fell only from 165 to 158.⁶

A control that works at the door moves the fraud to identities that already passed it, and past the tender itself: CargoNet expects deception groups to go after shipments already tendered to legitimate carriers, misdirecting them around compliance checks that have centered on the tender.¹ Its operations lead calls for identity verification "from booking to delivery".¹¹

The registry is also a weaker witness than it looks this year.

Existing USDOT and docket numbers do not change under Motus,¹⁴ and since the move the FMCSA has stopped inactivating USDOT numbers for missed biennial updates due from June 1, 2026, until further notice.¹² An active number in a 2026 carrier packet proves less than it did a year ago.

Criminals Now Change the Record Brokers Check Against

The FBI's alert describes the sequence. Criminals reach brokers' and carriers' systems through spoofed emails, fake links and compromised carrier accounts, and then change the legitimate carrier's contact information with the FMCSA.⁷ A broker who confirms the carrier against that record is confirming with them.

Highway flagged 2,256 unauthorized changes to carriers' FMCSA contact details in the first quarter of 2026,⁴ 13,746 in the second¹⁵ and 15,491 in the third.³ In the second quarter, half of the classified fraud vectors reaching it came through communications (compromised inboxes, spoofed emails, account takeovers, impersonation calls), up from 42.7% in the first.¹⁵

The phone number on file, the email on file and the reply chain all belong to whoever controls them now.

The FBI's advice is to verify every shipment request and pickup through a second channel before a load is released, because a familiar name or email address does not prove who is on the other end.⁷ When the number a carrier gives does not match its public SAFER record, the FMCSA says to phone the number the record shows.¹⁶

Both checks belong on every load, at the tender and at every change after it.

Brokers Pay for Fraud Twice: In Losses and in Hours

The Transportation Intermediaries Association, the trade body of third-party logistics companies, surveyed its members early in 2025. It received 59 responses, so read its figures as direction, not census.¹⁷ 22% of respondents had lost more than $200,000 to fraud in the previous six months,⁵ and 53% more than $10,000.¹⁷ 36% had lost less than $5,000.¹⁷

Prevention is a cost of its own: 10% had spent more than $200,000 on technology, staff time, insurance and training.¹⁷ And it is a cost in hours. 65% of respondents said they spend more than two hours a day, on average, preventing fraud, and 24% the whole day.¹⁷

The checks TIA's members cited most are comparisons: authority, insurance and safety records against more than one trusted source, recent contact or ownership changes, emails and phone numbers against established records.¹⁷

Run them on your own volume. Say your carrier team tenders 1,500 loads a month and a careful re-check takes five minutes a load (an assumption; time your own): that is 125 hours a month.

If the team skips the re-check for carriers it already knows, those repeat carriers' loads are the ones the three routes above run through. An agent can run the same comparison on every load and leave your team only the loads where something changed.

Insurance does not reliably close the gap. In WTW's worked example of a fraudulently booked load, the carrier's cargo policy did not respond because the carrier never had the load in its care, custody and control.

The broker's contingent cargo cover, which typically pays only when a carrier's insurer fails a valid claim, carried a full dishonesty exclusion for the carrier it had entrusted.¹⁸ Read that exclusion in your own policy before you lean on it.

How Qvery Builds an Identity Check Into Every Tender

The agent we build sits between your carrier team and the rate confirmation.

Before a rate confirmation goes out, it reads the load, the carrier on it and the email thread, and sets what it sees today against what your file held when that carrier was onboarded:

• The contact details on the carrier's FMCSA record.
• Its ownership and its insurance.
• The email domain and the phone number in the thread.
• The result from the vetting service you already pay for.

It repeats the comparison whenever the load changes before delivery: a reroute request, a new dispatcher on the thread, the driver and truck details sent at pickup.

When nothing has changed, the load moves on schedule and nobody has to touch it.

When something has, the agent holds it for your carrier rep with the reason in one line: a phone number changed on the federal record nine days ago, a reply from a free email address, an insurance certificate that names a different insurer. The rep confirms through the number on the public record, not the one in the email.

It is built for one brokerage. We map how your carrier team vets and tenders now, connect the agent to the TMS, inbox and vetting tools it already uses, and get a first working result live within two weeks.

After that it works on its own beside your carrier reps, and every week we report what it did: the hours of manual re-checking it took off your carrier reps, and the loads it held that should not have moved.

Brokers Now Need a Record of Why They Chose Each Carrier

On May 14, 2026, the Supreme Court held, unanimously, that a state claim that a broker negligently hired a carrier is not preempted by the federal law that deregulated trucking, because that law leaves states their authority over safety.¹⁹

The case was about a crash, not a theft, and how far it reaches into cargo losses is not settled. What it changes is what a carrier check is for: it is also the broker's evidence of how it chose.

The agent compares and flags; your carrier team decides which flagged loads still move, and the reason goes in the file with every comparison the agent made. After a loss, the FBI asks for a complaint to its Internet Crime Complaint Center as well as a police report.⁷

This week, pull last month's tenders and count the ones that went to a carrier whose phone, email or ownership changed after you onboarded it. Those are the loads your onboarding check could not see.