What we mean when we say 'freight fraud': Ways to defend trucking against the hydra-headed monster скачать в хорошем качестве

What we mean when we say 'freight fraud': Ways to defend trucking against the hydra-headed monster

"These are very entrepreneurial people, and very smart. And at this level, it's a business." --Wex Fleet One's William Fitzgerald Of the top of this Overdrive Radio episode, Fitzgerald, over the Wex company’s anti-crime efforts, made reference to just how organized the rings perpetrating a variety of scams all around the trucking industry have gotten. And the money involved -- money you want to keep, whether it’s a piece of freight transaction with a broker, money in your business accounts used to fraudulently buy fuel or steal freight, or one of the many other flavors of fraud you’ll hear touched on in this week's podcast. At the annual National Association of Small Trucking Companies conference, a panel convened to offer perspectives on crime, aimed at answering the question of just what we mean when we talk about "freight fraud." Too often, leaders around the industry and regulatory bodies tend to lump all manner of crimes in that bucket. We saw it to an extent again with news last week about the Department of Transportation’s intent to utilize AI tools against it: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15814889 Overdrive Executive Editor Alex Lockie's report there delved into ways experts believe automated systems could be used for recognition of bad actors, yet specifics in DOT Deputy Secretary Steven Brabury's talk were few and far between. (Keep tuned for follow-ups as Lockie keeps ears to the ground for federal responses to follow-up questions sent to DOT.) For NASTC President David Owen, It was one woman’s work around an old but ever-evolving issue -- that of "reincarnated" or "chameleon" carriers gaining authority over and over and over to outrun safety-record issues -- that got him thinking more closely about how the association might help small carriers of all stripes with education about and mitigation of all manner of frauds. Owen brought writer and researcher Danielle Chaffin into NASTC as Senior Sales Engineer following work mapping out numerous authorized entities she could link to each other in the registration system, as others like Dale Prax have done. She could see fairly simple, she felt, patterns of misrepresentation bad actors utilize. In enforcing the rules against such entities, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration seems to date reactive. A crash happens, FMCSA sees the employing carrier has reincarnated once or multiple times, and shuts them down. That seemed to be the case after the triple-fatal crash of Harjinder Singh. FMCSA shut down his employing carrier soon after that crash came to light: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15753590 If enforcement efforts could recognize a chameleon-type operation before such a disastrous event could even occur, though, would certainly be welcomed by most legit trucking companies. It's heartening to see DOT leaders at least paying lip service to putting systems in place to help. With the most high-profile crashes, for all the focus on CDL drivers behind the wheel, non-domiciled or not, all are employed somewhere. There's no shortage of analysis concluding many such employers are running around the normal hoops through which good carriers small, large and in between must jump to stay within the bounds of the rules to sustain real, legitimate business. Chameleon-type operations represent but one of the myriad types of frauds perpetrated on legitimate truckers and the American public. Panelists run through a variety of schemes and ways to tackle them head-on: Resources: **Cargo theft prevention: https://overdriveonline.com/15769312 **Recognizing double brokers, vetting systems: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15707529 **Identity theft: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15708218 **Wex's William Fitzgerald's fuel-fraud talk: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15772651 **'Cyber hygiene' and social-engineering hacks: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15755615