On April 12, “60 Minutes” showed America what the freight industry has known for years: carriers with catastrophic safety records can dissolve, reappear under a new identity, and return to the road with a clean slate. Fifteen thousand safety violations. Five hundred accidents in two years. ELDs reset remotely from overseas. Drivers working 18-hour shifts whose settlement checks came back negative. Customers that included Amazon, Walmart, Costco, and the United States Postal Service.
Days later, CBS conducted a deeper investigation, linking these patterns to the wider freight brokerage ecosystem. This raised questions about responsibility when carriers were never properly qualified to move America’s freight.
These stories are significant. However, as TIA CEO Chris Burroughs noted, the coverage “defaulted to a blame game, disconnected from the realities the industry has grappled with for two decades.” Assigning blame to brokers, carriers, or individuals only addresses symptoms. The underlying issue is structural.
A System Built on Sand
Consider the basics: becoming a motor carrier in America requires only $1,000 and 21 days. There is no American ownership requirement and minimal identity verification under the legacy system. FMCSA investigators have found single addresses with 400 to 500 registered entities. This is not a secure registration system; it is an open door.
Once you have authority, the qualification chain that is supposed to protect everyone else works like this: Do you have operating authority? Yes. Do you have insurance? Yes. What is your safety record? Satisfactory.
That is the foundation — three binary questions. And every one of them is a snapshot of a single moment in time.
A critical statistic: according to the TIA, over 94% of federally authorized trucking companies operate without any FMCSA safety rating. Most carriers have never undergone a full federal safety audit. As a result, the “satisfactory” rating that underpins the qualification process is missing for most carriers. The system is built not only on outdated snapshots, but also on significant gaps.
The issue with snapshots is that they reflect the past, not ongoing changes. A carrier rated satisfactory today may already be declining. By the time this is reflected in a safety rating, which can take months or years, the damage is done. Accidents occur, freight is stolen, and entities dissolve and re-emerge under new identities. Those who worked with the carrier during this decline are left with the liability.
When the System Fails, Everyone Pays
Think about what this broken infrastructure actually produces.
Cargo theft losses reached $725 million in 2025, a 60% increase in one year. Strategic theft, fictitious pickups, double brokering, and identity fraud now account for one-third of all cargo crime. These losses extend beyond the stolen load, impacting the entire system.
Insurance carriers respond to rising claims by raising premiums 10-30% across the board. They do not raise rates only on the bad actors. They raise rates on everyone. So the legitimate owner-operator who has never had a violation, who maintains his equipment, who runs honest hours, absorbs the cost of fraud committed by someone he has never met. That is not a market correction. That is a tax on integrity.
The economic impact extends further. When a significant portion of market capacity operates on fraudulent credentials and undercuts rates by avoiding compliance costs, honest carriers cannot compete. This creates a pricing floor subsidized by fraud. Shippers who pursue the lowest rates without understanding the risks are inadvertently supporting a system that distorts fair market-based freight rates, encourages a “race to the bottom” in freight rates, and endangers public safety.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is deciding whether freight brokers are liable when carriers they contract with cause crashes. The largest 3PL in the world argued before the justices that it relies on FMCSA’s determination of whether a carrier is fit to operate, and as Burroughs points out, that is a reasonable position, because brokers “lack the authority and tools to enforce safety standards, conduct audits, or ensure regulatory compliance.” The system asks them to rely on FMCSA’s data. But what happens when that data is already outdated the moment it is recorded? The question is not whether brokers should be doing more. The question is whether the infrastructure gives anyone — broker, carrier, or shipper — the tools to do enough.
The Road Runner Always Wins
Enforcement today is often one step behind. Regulators implement new measures, but bad actors adapt quickly. FMCSA forms a registration fraud team, yet fraudulent entities dissolve and reconstitute. New legislation, such as the SAFER Transport Act and Dalilah’s Law, is introduced, but by the time it passes, the methods of fraud have already changed.
This is not because the regulators are not trying. FMCSA’s new MOTUS registration system, rolling out in phases this year, adds real identity verification, cross-references shared addresses and personnel, and tightens the connection between registration and enforcement history. The SAFER Transport Act would create automated fraud detection, a DOT-to-DOJ referral pipeline, and bar convicted fraudsters from obtaining new authority. The TIA has long advocated for publishing a high-risk carrier list and modernizing the safety rating system. These are meaningful steps.
However, these are still reactive measures. The fundamental issue remains fraud evolves faster than bureaucracy can respond. By the time enforcement acts, the damage has already affected brokers, shippers, insurance pools, and honest drivers who bear the resulting costs.
What We Are Really Losing
Entrepreneurs built trucking in America. In 1927, a grocer named Conrad Gentry looked at a network of newly paved roads and saw a business: door-to-door freight, bypassing the railroads, powered by individual owner-operators who owned their own rigs and built their own livelihoods. Mayflower Transit became the first carrier with operating rights in all 50 states. That was the model: individual ambition, backed by hard work, enabled by a system that rewarded competence and accountability.
That model is now threatened. The average owner-operator is 56 years old, and only 20% of drivers are under 35. Turnover at large carriers is 90-95% annually. The pipeline of new entrants is shrinking due to lifestyle, economic factors, and the reality that competitors may operate with stolen credentials, falsified hours, and insurance tied to entities that may soon disappear.
Fraudulent capacity not only distorts rates but also erodes the economic foundation of legal commerce. It undermines the minimum standards expected in a regulated market. When these standards lose meaning, entrepreneurs exit the industry, leaving only those who cannot afford to leave to absorb the costs the system fails to prevent.
Something essential has been lost. The lawful pursuit of building a freight business — supported by compliance, accountability, and fair economic reward — has long underpinned this industry. That foundation is now being eroded from within.
The Only Answer Is Continuous Carrier Risk Monitoring
Point-in-time carrier qualification is outdated. It shows only what an entity looked like on the day of the check, not how it changes over time. In a market in which a carrier can decline rapidly between verifications, a spot check offers no real protection. It merely documents due diligence that may already be obsolete.
The solution is continuous carrier risk monitoring. This means not relying on a single onboarding check, not depending on factoring companies focused on cash flow rather than compliance, and not waiting for annual DOT audits when real-time data could reveal issues immediately.
Continuous monitoring involves tracking authority status, insurance, safety scores, violation patterns, and operational anomalies daily. It requires dynamic scoring of your carrier base to detect deterioration as it occurs, not after an incident or loss.
EKA Omni-TMS™ is designed for this purpose. It provides real-time visibility across your entire carrier base, every load, every lane, every day, enabling proactive management rather than reactive responses.
Action-Ready Intelligence provides real-time insights into carrier performance, lane-level risk, and operational anomalies — capabilities that point-in-time checks cannot match. Automated Workflows and WAMS monitor every handoff, flagging exceptions such as missed deadlines, documentation gaps, and behavioral patterns that manual processes cannot track at scale. EKA On-Time™ offers telematics-backed, auditable proof of chain of custody for disputed loads, carriers, or identities. Documents AI™ automatically validates freight documents against shipment data, identifying mismatches and discrepancies that signal early fraud.
The platform does not replace the regulatory system. Instead, it bridges the gap between regulatory oversight and real-time market activity, operating and delivering risk management services at the speed and performance level business requires.
The Bottom Line
“60 Minutes” gave the nation a window into an industry problem. The CBS investigation widened the frame. The Supreme Court is weighing where liability falls. Congress is drafting new laws. FMCSA is modernizing registration. All of that matters.
However, carriers, brokers, and shippers cannot wait for systemic changes. Fraudsters will not wait, and never have.
To manage your business ethically, economically, and lawfully in this environment, you must develop the ability to monitor activity continuously, rather than reacting after losses occur.
If you are ready to address these challenges proactively, contact EKA Solutions. The infrastructure of trust will not rebuild itself; it begins with the platform you choose for your business.