Broker Impersonation and Double Brokering: How Freight Fraud Actually Works

What are broker impersonation and double brokering?

Quick answer: broker impersonation is when a criminal poses as a legitimate broker, often using a compromised email or a lookalike domain, to get a carrier to haul freight for free or to redirect a payment. Double brokering is when a criminal steals a real carrier's identity and MC number, accepts a load from a broker, then re-subcontracts it to a second, unknowing carrier who actually hauls it and never gets paid. Both scams cost the freight industry hundreds of millions of dollars a year and are growing fast: total supply chain crime losses hit an estimated $725 million in 2025, up 60% from 2024, according to Verisk CargoNet.

Freight fraud has become mostly a digital crime. Criminals rarely touch a truck. They register a lookalike domain, hack a carrier's email account, or buy a real company's MC authority, and let the paperwork do the stealing. That is exactly why the controls that stop it look more like email security than physical security.

How common is this, really?

• ★97% of respondents to TIA's 2025 State of Fraud survey named truckload freight the most fraud-prone mode in the industry.
• ★22% of TIA survey respondents lost more than $200,000 to fraud in a six-month period; another 10% spent more than $200,000 on prevention in the same window.
• ★Fraudulent email attempts targeting carriers and brokers rose from 914,719 in 2024 to nearly 2 million in 2025, according to Highway's Freight Fraud Index.
• ★In an Overdrive survey of owner-operators, 28% said their most common fraud experience was straightforward double brokering, a second broker paying them a reduced amount and pocketing the difference.

How the scam actually works

Broker impersonation

A criminal registers a domain one character off from a real broker's, for example a company using ABCBroker.com might see a fake ABCBrokerLLC.com appear. They contact a carrier, post a load, and either never pay after the freight is delivered, or send fake "updated payment details" mid-transaction to redirect a legitimate broker's payment into their own account. In some documented cases, the criminal doesn't even register a new domain, they compromise the real broker's or carrier's email account directly and reply to an in-progress conversation, making the fraud far harder to catch because the email address itself is genuine.

Double brokering

This one starts with identity theft, not impersonation. The criminal acquires a real, active MC number, sometimes by buying a shell authority, sometimes by outright stealing a legitimate small carrier's identity and FMCSA credentials. Using that stolen identity, they accept a load directly from a broker. They never intend to drive it. Instead, they turn around and re-post the same load to a second, legitimate carrier who has no idea any of this happened. That second carrier hauls the freight, delivers it, and never gets paid, because the criminal already collected from the original broker and disappeared.

A 2025 U.S. Senate Commerce Committee briefing on freight fraud described this exact mechanic: criminals steal the identity of an existing broker or carrier, create a lookalike domain, and subcontract the load to an unwitting third-party carrier who transports it to a different delivery point than the shipper specified, or under falsified paperwork, without ever physically touching the freight themselves.

Real cases

• ★United States v. Alexis Castillo Padilla (San Diego, 2022): a Tijuana-based defendant pleaded guilty to a double-broker scheme that stole the identity of a Spring Valley, California carrier, then re-brokered loads to unwitting carriers who were never paid. Restitution to victims was set at a minimum of $239,904. He was arrested in Italy and extradited to the US.
• ★Rubik Aveytan and sons (federal case, jailed 2011): a father and two sons built shell companies registered directly in FMCSA's SAFER system and made more than $1 million through double brokering before being caught and sentenced to federal prison. The case is older, but the mechanic, fake FMCSA-registered shells, is unchanged today.
• ★DOJ case, Maine shipper / Illinois carrier (July 2025): a shipper's cargo was released to a fraudster after the real carrier's email account had been hacked. The compromised email replied to a legitimate shipping setup request with completed paperwork, and the fraudster physically picked up the frozen seafood shipment using a fake ID at the pickup location. The case shows how a pure email compromise, no fake website needed, can lead directly to physical cargo theft.

What actually catches it before a load moves

Frequently asked questions