Hector Adrian Esquivel Rodriguez, a cross-border carrier dispatch manager, received an "interesting" cold call the other day from someone called Tony Parker at Truck Secure Inc. Parker inquired if he could buy Rodriguez' motor carrier (MC) number and then get the pin to transfer the authority to a different LLC under the same fleet name.
"After asking a few questions, he offered me $2,500," Rodriguez wrote in this LinkedIn post. "Apparently, they are calling all the companies with pending insurance cancelation. They're smart."
Freight-market watchers have long warned readers about the danger of identity theft and how scammers can impersonate your business, but in the last few years, cargo theft, double brokering, freight payment theft and other schemes have proven so profitable that, these days, a would-be scammer might just be willing to buy you out.
[Related: Would-be FMCSA registration hackers claim to fight fraud with latest phishing expedition]
Parker confirmed he tried to buy an MC from Rodriguez, but denied his company bought or sold MC numbers. Parker said he had a trucking company that was booted off of the Amazon Relay platform, and that he "only need one MC number with a good safety record."
I asked him about the company he said he represented, Truck Secure Inc., which advertises on its website that it buys and sells "aged MC" numbers, even listing testimonials purportedly from past customers, but Parker said he didn't know about that and would reach out to a manager.
As far as I can tell, the company's website didn't exist before May of 2024, but it makes a pretty good sales pitch on why one might want to buy an MC number.
Buying one of Truck Secure Inc.'s "aged MC" numbers "eliminates the 'red tape,'" according to the website. "Our aged companies come with more than 1 years of experience. No one will view you as a 'beginner'!"
The aged MC might also get your insurance costs down and give you an in with brokers, and the MC's safe history "will not draw unwanted attention from the authorities," the pitch says, concluding this way: "A long and clean history is a rare sight in the industry. With our MC/DOT you will stand out from your competitors!"
There can be legitimate reasons to buy or transfer a MC number, as Truckstop CEO Kendra Tucker explained in a recent video commenting on the new trend of MC sales.
"There are definitely legitimate ways to go about selling your MC," said Tucker. "What’s happening is that people are selling their MCs for relatively low prices, and when we talked about this with the FMCSA," the agency noted "being able to sell your MC was actually designed more for absorbing the whole company and then changing the contact information over to the new owner."
Instead, what Tucker and others see now is "nefarious actors" buying the MC but not changing any of the personal contact information associated with it. "It becomes almost like a paid-for identity theft that is really victimizing carries in particular," she said.
[Related: Safeguard your trucking business' certificate of insurance to avoid becoming a victim of ID theft]
After I'd communicated with Parker, he sent Rodriguez instructions on how to complete the sale by providing Truck Secure Inc. everything they'd need to transfer the MC to their own business.
First, to get half the. payment, they asked Rodriguez to send the following:
- Copy of driver’s license or CDL for Bill of Sale preparation
- MC Certificate
- Loss Run report from insurance (full period)
- Access for Amazon Relay account
- Access for JB Hunt and DAT accounts (if yes)
- USDOT PIN
Once Parker received all of that, he said he’d send half the payment and then ask for the following.
- FMCSA Portal login
- RMIS ID or access
- Article of organization
- IFTA or IRP report
- General release letter from factoring company
Perhaps it comes as no surprise that we've yet to hear a word from any Truck Secure Inc. manager, despite multiple requests for comment, but Truck Secure Inc. isn't by a long shot the only player in the market for MC numbers, which rose in earnest "about two years ago," said Scott Cornell, transportation lead and crime and theft specialist at Travelers and a leading voice on cargo theft through identity fraud and other means. "Myself and a couple other experts obtained some intel that there were some organized rings out there purchasing MC numbers in bulk."
At that time, Cornell said they bought MC numbers in the hundreds. Since then, he added, it's grown into the thousands.
Today, it's easy to buy an old MC number. MC numbers are advertised for sale on Facebook and Reddit, and as shown Truck Secure Inc. hosts a native website dedicated to moving MCs. According to Cornell, some carriers might expect up to $30,000 for a "seasoned" MC number onboarded with lots of brokers. After a run of bad luck in trucking, small fleet owner Russel Holland sold his to someone who contacted him out of the blue, just as Parker did with Rodriguez. Holland said simply at that time that he could use the money, which he said was just a few hundred dollars.
[Related: Brokers new 'carrier vetting' craze bad for trucking, carriers say]
Cornell links the MC number trade directly to the boom in cargo theft, load payment theft and other scams and fraud schemes.
"Theoretically, you could use a portion of those MC numbers to legitimately haul freight and establish a level of trust," said Cornell. "If I’m a bad guy, I could theoretically use some of the MC numbers to haul freight, and then I'm going to get paid to haul that freight, gain trust, gather intel on what’s being moved where, who is moving what for whom, and then take some of the other MC numbers, get booked on loads and steal the loads."
Cornell believes that's exactly what organized rings "ended up doing," as he put it.
Since he initially sounded the alarm two years ago, he's seen it only get worse. Often, the bad actors with an army of MCs "plan and then say, 'on this date we're going to get on as many loads as we can and then we're going to disappear,'" said Cornell. "They’ll hit for a dozen or three dozen loads for a day or week."
Once a load (or payment) is stolen and the carrier disappears, what good is a report in a carrier vetting service about that carrier's authority? The fraudulent business won't show up in court or respond to anything. Unless someone gets physically caught, it's game over.
Cornell said the MC number trade has become a regular 9-5 job for many. "Two things cargo thieves are really good at," said Cornell: "Knowing what to steal and where, and two is return on investment. They're fantastic at that."
Additionally, the targets of what Cornell and others refer to as "strategic cargo theft" -- where the load gets stolen via various kinds identity fraud, misdirection and the like -- are typicall small carriers.
"Most of the time when the bad guys pretend to be a broker and hire a small trucking company," Cornell said, "they're never going out and hiring a top 50 carrier. They want one with 10 units or less."
Not only does MC number manipulation fool brokers and shippers, it fools the "carrier vetting" services that sell brokerages on the ability to spot bad actors. If a trusted carrier decides to cash out and sign over the business tomorrow, throwing in their email and phone number for extra cash, how should a vetting service catch that exactly?
"There's no silver bullet" to stop freight fraud, even with all the carrier vetting software in the world, said Cornell.
With rates in the gutter for at least half a year now, insurance and other costs on the rise, the increasingly annoying asks of brokers on the spot market, and the seemingly insurmountable fraud problem trading in MCs in broad daylight, why shouldn't an owner-operator sell their MC number, if it could net a $30,000 payout for just a few numbers on your way out of business with authority?
According to Cornell, owner-ops just don't have a lot of quit in them. Truck drivers' testimony and "spider senses" lead to a lot of bad guys caught, he said. "My take is most of the time drivers, the minute they feel like they’re being used in some way to commit something negative to the industry they poured their lifeblood into," they fight back. "Truck drivers, in my opinion, do not make good victims, and are often good allies for investigative groups or law enforcement."
Rodriguez, for his part, perfectly fit Cornell's categorization of true trucking professionals. Rodriguez noted two days after Parker's initial cold call about his company's MC, Parker followed up, still pushing for the buy. Rodriguez strung his cold caller on just to see how deep the rabbit hole went.
"I will never sell my MC," said Rodriguez. "Because at the end of the day it's my company name, and it cost me a lot hard work and effort to survive this market. I'd rather lose my authority than help guys to screw" real carriers over by selling away his credentials.
After all, despite the bad market, Rodriguez is just having too much fun in trucking.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration did not comment on Truck Secure Inc. or the trade of MC numbers. FMCSA does plan to do away with MC numbers entirely and audit the registration of every entity in their system as part of their move to a brand-new registration system. As part of the move, detailed here, FMCSA's Ken Riddle detailed a plan to also eliminate transfers of authority, but for certain limited circumstances. "We'll have to allow for corporate mergers and other mergers, but some of the transfers that are happening today will probably come to an end."
Here's hoping it helps.
Read more about federal efforts to revamp and safeguard its authority registration system via these stories:
**FMCSA to audit all authorities, hires new registration fraud team
**FMCSA's registration overhaul 'incomplete and piecemeal': Legal experts
**With registration-overhaul push, does FMCSA have a sole proprietor problem?
**FMCSA to end MC numbers, overhaul registration system to stamp out fraud
