Generative AI Could Be Supercharging Freight Industry Fraud

Authored by Mark LaBrosse via FreightWaves.com,

We’ve all heard how emerging AI technologies will optimize the freight industry in ways we can only dream about. But the scary truth is that AI is already fueling our nightmares—by supercharging freight theft.

Why aren’t more people talking about the dark side of AI? For one, most of the worries are centered on job loss and plagiarism. But perhaps it’s largely because it’s so good that it’s hard to detect. Regardless, it’s clear some strategies are already in play.

What’s critical to know: Even those highly attuned to scams can fall victim as generative AI more closely mimics real business experiences and enables crime syndicates to operate at scale.

This is an arms race. It will take good-guy tech fighting bad-guy tech and a coordinated human response to protect cargo from these modern cyber pirates.

Discerning real from fake is getting increasingly difficult

Crime syndicates can already evade detection and prosecution by operating outside the United States and creating new fraudulent documentation whenever they’re discovered. 

With AI in play, these bad actors are orders of magnitude more effective.

“Generative AI makes fraud an infinitely scalable and near-automatic process,” warns BAYNCORE senior consultant Dr. Richard Paul, who earned his PhD in computer simulation and artificial intelligence.

“Anyone can now set up an AI bot to scan the internet for key fragments of information,” Paul explains. “When assembled, these simple AI tools can automatically create documents, emails, and text messages that appear legitimate.”

Monitoring a freight industry awash in phishing scams, Brittany Graft, COO of fraud prevention platform Highway, shares Paul’s concern.

“If we take phishing schemes, for example, we historically have been able to detect and avoid them because the English is broken, the grammar is poor, or a logo is misplaced. AI is going to help the bad guys create an experience that so closely replicates what brokers and carriers are used to,” says Graft, “that the discerning eye will have a harder time picking up that it’s a scam.”

“Already, we’re seeing phishing attempts work because the imitations are so good,” Graft continues. “If we click some of these links, they look exactly like the legitimate site.”

And once brokers and carriers enter their credentials into illegitimate login pages and websites, their accounts—even email inboxes—are immediately compromised. From there, it’s quick work for AI agents and those using the tools to insert themselves at every level, logging into load boards, capturing freight, and creating havoc.

Complicating matters further, bad actors can use generative AI to beat the numbers game by creating tens or even hundreds of fraudulent carriers or brokers—complete with cloned sites, identical documents, and perfectly written emails. 

One, two, even fifty fraudulent carriers could be caught, and it would barely be a dent in the coming cyber threat onslaught.

“At the same time, freight brokers are being held to ever-higher standards of accountability in the court of law,” according to FreightWaves Group President, Kaylee Nix. “The situation has reached a crisis, and it’s time for the industry to come together to address this critical problem and share best practices on how to mitigate it.”

In response, the logistics industry’s largest media platform is hosting a FreightWaves Fraud Symposium on May 14 to help brokers better protect their businesses and customers.

FBI raising the alarm on deepfakes

In December 2024, the FBI issued an alert, drawing attention to how criminals are using generative AI to scam the general public. These same tactics are also being deployed against freight industry businesses and their customers.

In addition to creating fraudulent credentials, the FBI specifically cites how vocal cloning, audio bots, and generative video can falsely confirm the identity of the person you’re speaking to.

Now classic verification methods, like a simple phone call to confirm identity, can be thwarted.

“They can convince you they are from someone you know,” Paul says. “Complete with intimate details about you, in a familiar tone, even convincingly cloning a voice you know well.”

Paul adds, “The content and messaging these custom AIs generate is near-perfect, even better than legitimate actors frequently create—and thus is very hard to detect.”

Graft shares these concerns.

“We go really deep on verifying the identities of motor truck carriers and the individuals who represent them,” she says. “We collect their driver’s license, ask them to take a live photo, and verify that their digital identity matches their physical identity.”

“We’re aware of the potential for generative AI to replicate that live photo step and potentially try to brute force the system by creating multiple attempts to see which one will work,” Graft continues. “We’re bringing machine learning into that process to detect the visual signals on AI-generated photos and monitor the number of attempts.”

It’s clear—we’ll need tech solutions like this to get ahead of AI-enabled fraud.

Building trust face-to-face: The freight industry’s human response

If you’re worried about strategic cargo theft, you’re not alone. A Freight Caviar poll found that double brokering was the leading fraud concern among brokers, topping outright theft and hijacking. 

In this threat landscape, it’s highly likely that every broker and carrier in the country has already been targeted—or will be in short order. It’s the worst-kept secret in the industry. Unfortunately, victimized brokers and carriers have experienced a shocking lack of action when they’ve turned to the FMCSA. This rapidly rising fraud simply hasn’t been an agency priority.

While the federal government has yet to take meaningful action, freight brokers and carriers aren’t standing idle. They are taking their own actions, adopting new tools, and opening up dialogue.

Partly in response to this chaos, they’ve banded together and launched the Broker-Carrier Summit to deliver critical education, build relationships, and open up the lines of communication necessary to strengthen the industry and help fend off scammers.

Fighting fire with fire: The freight industry’s tech response

While emerging technologies have enabled a whole new level of criminality, brokers and carriers also leverage cutting-edge tech to protect against AI-powered scammers. In fact, tech-enabled fraud prevention tools have done more to combat this increasingly sophisticated threat than anything else out there.

Graft agrees.

“We’ll have to increasingly rely on technology to help us ascertain identities because AI is going to get better at impersonating reality,” she says.

What tools do we have at our disposal?

Digital identity wallets, like the well-established ID.me, are now taking direct aim at deepfakes, leveraging biometrics for facial verification and liveness detection. (Privacy concerns aside.)

Carrier vetting platforms, including FreightValidate and Carrier411, surface an operator’s entire history—or, in the case of many bad actors, the lack of a legitimate history.

Some carrier identity SaaS systems and plugins, like Highway, feature machine learning (ML) to monitor inbound phone calls and email inboxes, looking for various fraud signals, like spoofed phone numbers and email addresses.

As this digital war rages on, some fraud detection tools are getting into a more proactive position, now executing real-time behavioral and intent monitoring—detecting increasingly subtle patterns.

It’s a lot to take in, I realize. The growing scale of strategic freight theft—up 1,500% since 2021, according to the American Trucking Association—is enough to leave you breathless.

We’ll need every human and tech-enabled arrow in our quiver to protect our supply chain.