This week on the Overdrive Radio podcast, a bit of a double feature. We'll hear from Jason Decker -- regular Overdrive readers will recall my reporting on some of Decker’s talk at the Mid-America Trucking Show back in March that was something of a rallying cry for a “whole of trucking” approach to the fight against double brokering, leaching money from the freight markets through fraud as it is.
Rates are bad enough already, it’s sure, as Decker emphasized.
Fraudulent actors insert themselves into a freight transaction, disappear with a fuel advance or the entire load’s payment. If the trucker’s paid at all, then, it’s a double payment on the part of whoever was the original broker and/or shipper on the load. That's but one double-brokering scenario. Perhaps worse than that, in Decker’s and I know many owner-operators’ views, legit brokers who knowingly "give the load to another brokerage," Decker said. "They are double-dipping. Rates are tight enough as it is that one hand in the pot is one too many."
Two? Three? Market distortion is all the worse for it, with the trucker on the short end of the stick.
[Related: 'Fraud epidemic': Congress gets earful on double brokering, speed limiters]
Listen for ways owner-operators can recover payment after getting involved in a scam, but more importantly, ways to be fundamentally proactive to avoid and shut out the fraudsters, and those double-dippers, to begin with.
