With fraudulent schemes on the rise, 2025 has seen a sharp spike in stolen vehicles across all major load boards.

Carriers, shippers, and their numerous fleet and dealer clients who transport vehicles must learn to distinguish between red flags and green lights.

The theft surge has exposed critical vulnerabilities in the industry’s ability to detect and prevent fraudulent carrier behavior before it leads to financial and reputational damage.

In the worst-case scenario, a fraudulent carrier picks up a vehicle from an individual customer or dealership. stealing it. The recovery rate for stolen vehicles sits around 50%, but the chances of recovery are close to nil once thieves dismantle the vehicle for parts or traffic it through black markets. 

For an industry where a single unit can represent six figures in value, one successful scam can devastate the finances and damage the reputations of the shipper and carrier.

How Scammers Access the Industry

In the past, scammers created fake carrier companies to steal loads. When carriers put safeguards in place to distinguish between legitimate and fraudulent transactions, scammers stepped up. They started posing as legitimate carriers. 

They could steal their identity, access their accounts by hacking passwords, or resort to various common scams, even outside the industry. But scammers are smart and have invented ways to get past roadblocks, which is why shippers and carriers must put up additional guards.

What Does Fraud Look Like?

A fraudulent carrier profile looks legitimate on the surface but diverges in behavioral patterns. They’re doing the bare minimum to get past your security system, so while their tactics might be sophisticated, their details can be sloppy. 

For instance, they may express unusual interest in high-value shipments, look for loads near ports, or display mismatched capacity or incomplete credentials. They may have unusual negotiation tactics, push for atypical routing, make rapid schedule changes, or cancel unexpectedly after securing sensitive information. These are all signs of fraudulent activity.

This type of fraud may seem obvious, but at scale, the details start to blur, and that’s what fraudsters count on. They wait for the moments when your team is stretched thin, the phones won’t stop ringing, and deadlines are pressing. 

In fact, most fraud attempts occur on a Friday towards the end of the day, and long weekends just amplify the attempts. All it takes is a split second of distraction or one skipped security step, and that’s when they slip through. 

A person can rarely spot these details because they are deviations, but not necessarily outliers. You would have to analyze a massive amount of data they would have to analyze to spot even one of these attempts.

What Tools Protect Your Operation From Fraud?

Most current defenses resemble two-factor authentication: validating a carrier’s identity at the first point of booking and usually every 60 to 90 days after that. A carrier can get hacked after or between compliance checks, so that’s no longer enough. Generalized fraud-detection software often relies on cross-industry data, lacking the nuance of vehicle logistics.

What’s needed are tools built by the vehicle logistics industry for the industry, leveraging decades of internal carrier behavioral data to pinpoint when and what a carrier does that deviates from the norm.

This level of contextual intelligence and deep understanding of how vetted carriers operate, from order sequencing to route profiles, allows shippers to flag anomalies confidently without straining relationships with legitimate partners.

To combat fraud, shippers require more than just an alert system; they need an integrated and seamless solution that constantly monitors for fraud at any moment. Technology should empower shippers without requiring extra steps and be driven by real-time analysis to provide instant, actionable insights.

What Does this Mean for Shippers and Carriers?

Fraud threatens every link in the vehicle logistics chain. Shippers face financial loss and damaged reputation, while carriers risk identity theft and costly disputes. Advanced fraud detection protects individual stakeholders and the integrity of the entire automotive supply chain.

By building resilience against fraud, the industry can safeguard assets, maintain customer trust, and ensure the reliable transportation of vehicles.

Vlad Kadurin is the chief product and operations officer for Ship.Cars.