Carrier411 CEO Darren Brewer quietly made major changes to the legacy carrier vetting platform's FreightGuard system on October 1 without telling its customers, "just to see who would notice," Brewer said.
The update sought to shut down a "cottage industry" of people selling FreightGuard removal services with a significant change: Making FreightGuard reports permanent after 72 hours.
"It’s mind-blowing," said Brewer. "I put some changes on the public part of our site. I dripped out some information publicly about the changes that are being made. On purpose I put it out prior to announcing to our customers. ...
"Literally within hours it was noticed big-time. The industry reacted beyond my expectations."
The reaction, for the most part, was alarm. Attorney Dan Artaev, a founder of the Carrier Defender platform, which offers FreightGuard dispute mediation, warned his broker clients to avoid using the service or take on serious legal risks. John Cantera, managing director at fraud prevention firm Vigilant Transportation Services, said Carrier411 had "declared war on carriers."
[Related: Brokers' 'carrier vetting' craze bad for trucking, carriers say]
Carrier411, as any carrier who has tried to interact with the service knows, isn't for carriers and won't talk to them.
"Carriers are not our customers. We don’t talk to carriers about anything and we do not allow carriers to have accounts," said Brewer. "Every known phone number from every carrier is blocked from us."
But Carrier411 holds power over motor carriers who work with brokers. As perhaps the oldest, biggest platform in the blossoming "carrier vetting" industry, thousands of brokers use the product every day and swear by it. Brewer and 411 subscribe to FMCSA data and report on carriers to brokers, and perhaps no clearer red flag exists in the industry than a FreightGuard, Carrier411's term for their report about a trucking company, based on collected data as well as individual allegations about carriers from broker users of the service.
When a broker files an allegation against a carrier, the carrier gets notified by its FMCSA-registered email and has a chance to respond to the broker -- that response isn't visible on the Carrier411 platform.
The update earlier this month gives Carrier411's broker customers 72 hours to hear back from the carrier and potentially edit its allegation/report. During that period, the broker can see to it that the post is "actually deleted as if it were never submitted."
But after that three-day period, the report can't really be deleted -- it will stay visible on the platform. "Reports older than 72 hours that get deleted will be reclassified as deleted and still be listed," the Carrier411 website says, but the customer's data "will be blurred and concealed so it is not identifiable in any way."
That brokers have a ubiquitous flagging system for carriers, and carriers have no counterpart for brokers that is of similar reach, nor any way to directly contest a FreightGuard report with an account on Carrier411, has yielded no shortage of complaint from carriers through the years. Complaints about Carrier411 take many other shapes and forms, too, from allegations of the platform refusing to acknowledge errors in the data it reports to allegations of discrimination against Armenian-Americans.
[Related: Trucking authority lookup services may not always be accurate]
The chief carrier complaint against Carrier411 remains that a brokerage with, say, three months in business and a $99/month subscription to Carrier411 can, rightly or wrongly, tank a motor carrier with decades in business and mouths to feed.
Furthermore, the power of a negative FreightGuard to financially ruin businesses over unverified claims has resulted in costly legal action.
Attorney Artaev pointed to one egregious example that cost a brokerage dearly.
In October of 2022, a small fleet called Greenline Express Transportation out of Sacramento, California, agreed to haul a load of cucumbers from Gordon, Alabama, to Garrettsville, Ohio, for a brokerage called High Plains Logistics.
Greenline had agreed to pick up the load at 2 p.m. Central on October 27, but at 8:30 a.m. Eastern time, six and a half hours before the scheduled pickup, while the driver slept during a mandatory 10-hour rest break, the broker called the driver, according to facts of the case listed in a complaint to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
The sleeping driver hung up on the broker, who then shot back the following text: “You know what, you just lost your load to Cleveland. Asshole.”
Before the team at Greenline even woke up out West, the broker had fully freaked out. The broker at High Plains would post a variety of allegations to Carrier411, accusing the sleeping driver of “no show and no call” and “cancelled after accepting load;” of being engaged in “fraudulent activity” and “unethical or deceptive business practices" as well as leaving comments to the effect that Greenline were double brokers and liars.
High Plains wouldn't remove their allegations until the court ordered it done. The court found High Plains guilty of defamation and tortious interference with a business and awarded Greenline $208,000 in compensatory damages as well as $250,000 in punitive damages on October 13, 2023, just two weeks short of a year after the initial incident.
In short, the court made a quarter-million-dollar example out of High Plains, which did not defend itself in court, and emphatically found in favor of the carrier. Yet that same court found Carrier411 was not a party to the dispute.
Carrier411 and the content moderation nightmare
Carrier411 enjoys protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which protects online platforms from liability against users' content. For example, there are plenty of bad and misleading, or even possibly dangerous, posts on Facebook, Reddit, TikTok or any other social media platform, but courts typically don't hold the platforms liable for damages caused by the posts.
In the case of High Plains, the judge ordered the brokerage to remove the false allegations.
But what if High Plains couldn't delete their own allegations, as Carrier411 now essentially makes impossible after 72 hours? Artaev warned his broker clients that, essentially, there would be no way to stop the bleeding in the case of punitive damages, which in High Plains' case rang up to $250,000 for about a year.
"I have advised all my broker clients to reevaluate using Carrier411 in light of the changes to the platform," Artaev wrote on LinkedIn following the platform updates. "These changes present a material increase in liability exposure risk for brokers. In short, if a FreightGuard is posted by you (or someone on behalf of your brokerage), you are stuck with it, and the consequences."
The legal implications could be steep, according to Artaev. "At a minimum," he wrote, this makes tort liability for brokerages "open-ended" with "no way to mitigate damages" from false reporting. This, naturally, would bleed into insurance costs increasing or "even exclusions from coverage," he added.
"Even for broker clients with robust internal processes and checks in place, it's simply not worth the risk" to contribute to Carrier411 FreightGuards, he concluded.
Not only might brokers open themselves up to uncapped damages, but in Artaev's view Carrier411 also essentially becomes an "indispensable party" to lawsuits like Greenline's, he said.
"If we were to file [the Greenline v. High Plains lawsuit] today and the broker wasn’t able to remove the FreightGuard, we’d have to also sue Carrier411, in my opinion," to get them to remove the broker's allegations, he said.
That said, Artaev acknowledged that Carrier411 has legal counsel, and must have considered the implications of its decisions around the recent changes.
Asked directly about the legal implications of permanent FreightGuards, Carrier411 CEO Brewer called Artaev's theory "misinformation," without specifying what exactly he disagreed with or what Artaev might have gotten wrong.
Brewer accused Artaev of "making a career out of harassing and threatening" freight brokers, though the attorney represents both carriers and freight brokers as clients, and has a legal responsibility to advance their interests. Artaev served his state working as an Assistant Attorney General representing state agencies in labor-related matters, so it's more than a stretch to say his career revolves solely around brokers, or even freight writ large.
Brewer further denied Carrier411 has a problem with false allegations in FreightGuards.
"About 95% [of Freight Guard reports] are accurate and the carriers have been caught doing what they’ve done and they’ve been held accountable," said Brewer. "Some people say, 'Oh the broker is just having a bad day,'" as reason for filing a negative allegation, "but that's just not true."
Since Overdrive's call with Brewer, Carrier411 added several new criteria under which brokers can report carriers. Now, a broker can report a carrier for employing "personnel, employees, representatives, or operations located outside United States or Canada," or filing a claim on a broker's surety bond for various reasons, from "dissatisfaction with the broker's service" to "misunderstandings of contract terms," among many other new criteria
Brewer said the broker customers he spoke to about the changes to FreightGuard deletion were happy with them. Overdrive also spoke to several brokers who liked the notion of making any filed allegation a permanent feature of a carrier's FreightGuard report. This move, according to several who provided comment, might put an end to carriers calling and harassing brokers to take down their allegations.
According to Cale Pearson, president of broker B2B Transportation Services, Inc., Carrier411 represents a vital tool he uses daily, but one brokers need to use carefully.
[Related: What are your rights when a broker doesn't pay?]
Carriers harassing brokers, or brokers harassing carriers?
Carrier411 has "good reach, everyone knows what it is," said Pearson. Moreover, "the information feels accurate" on the platform. Yet in his view, "the biggest challenge is how people use it."
Pearson said his brokerage has filed allegations to a carrier's FreightGuard report about a "clear double brokering situation," only to have the carrier, or double broker masquerading as a carrier, "blow us up, offering us food, offering us money, saying 'what's it going to cost to pull it down?'"
For that reason, Pearson likes that all elements of the FreightGuard reports will become permanently visible. "Carrier411 is trying to get away from [fraudsters] buying the removal of them" with the move, he said.
John Cantera, host of the "Stop the Scam" podcast, said he spoke with Brewer about the changes, and that they were aimed at third party services who sought to help carriers get FreightGuards taken down. Cantera invited carriers to sound off on the changes by emailing [email protected], so long as they could keep it professional, identify any problem and why it's a problem, and offer a solution.
So far, Cantera said no one has written in with feedback.
Pearson knows about Artaev's legal worries over the changes to the system, but he's not worried because his company has strong internal protocols around posting to the Carrier411 service. With just about 2,500 loads per month moving through his brokerage, Pearson said they still have time to evaluate any problems on a "case by case basis." For anything aside from a major violation, like obvious double brokering, a back solicitation, or a no call, no show that leaves a crane stranded, Pearson said his company would probably just make a note in their internal system.
Now with FreightGuard reports permanent, "I have to tread lightly" on leaving a bad review, he said. Overall, Pearson's policy precludes freakouts like the one that happened in Greenline's case with broker High Plains.
Pearson described how he counseled his freight reps: "If you feel like we need to post a FreightGuard, sleep on it, let’s go back and decide tomorrow," he said. "Nothing is going change tomorrow. Let cooler heads prevail."
According to Artaev, careful brokers like Pearson really need not worry about the legal implications of a FreightGuard.
"If every broker handled FreightGuards with care and precision like Cale, I would not have a transportation law department," said Artaev on Pearson's podcast.
Of course, if every poster on an online platform watched, waited, and only posted thoughtful, verifiable information, online platforms would have nothing to worry about. The reality is much different. Some of the biggest and richest companies in the world -- Google, Facebook, Apple -- all struggle mightily with content moderation, and all enjoy Section 230 protections just like Carrier411.
Artaev said Carrier411's move to allow user deletions within 72 hours, but still displaying anything deleted after that period, still opens up Brewer's company to lawsuits, in his view, and could open up brokers to paying compensatory damages even after they act to delete a report. But evidence that a broker tried to delete a report might mitigate some of the punitive damages, he said.
Another broker who spoke to Overdrive raised an interesting legal question for the new Freight Guard system: What if I book a load with a carrier who had a FreightGuard report marked as deleted and something terrible happened?
"That could be negligence" on the broker's part, said Artaev.
Ultimately, parties will have to file lawsuits and judges will have to rule on the real legal impact of Carrier411's recent changes, but Artaev suggested another way: Give carriers a voice.
"I totally get where Carrier411 was coming from in trying to protect their customers with the changes," said Artaev. "But there are probably better ways to do it. I always thought giving the carrier some sort of meaningful opportunity to respond would go a long way. A chance to submit proof otherwise" and have that proof displayed on Carrier411.
Just as with some of the other carrier vetting tools, Carrier411 "can't control how people consume their content," said Artaev. Some brokers will see any hint of negativity on a FreightGuard and ditch the carrier altogether. On the other hand, some noted they'd read the report and hear a carrier out.
[Related: Carriers cry foul over Carrier Assure's grading system]
