#6: AI Applied to Reduce Carrier Fraud and Accelerate Procurement
Fraud is rampant in North America freight. Learn how AI, integrated partners, and unique business logic built into NuvoOS is helping us eliminate fraud and accelerate carrier procurement
Fraud is Exploding in North America Freight
Highway’s Q2 2025 Fraud Index showed fraud attempts are up 257% year-over-year, with 45,000+ fake carrier identities flagged in a single quarter and cargo theft losses now average $214,000 per incident.
Every fraud incident is terrible for shippers, carriers, brokers, and all other legitimate parties involved who are just trying to move freight and be about their business.
Fraud is rampant in the industry for 3 reasons:
New carrier risk: Brokers and shippers are always searching for new carriers to reduce their costs and improve service levels; that means every new carrier you add runs the risk of being fraudulent if they dupe your compliance checks.
Fraudsters are getting smarter: With the accelerated pace of digitization in freight, it’s getting easier to understand ways to “trick” actors in the system to bypass legacy & antiquated compliance checks.
Dollar sizes are large: While freight brokers and carriers tend to have lower margins, the dollar sizes per transaction are large so fraudsters are highly motivated as they can easily make millions of dollars through fraud.
There are newer tools like Highway that have been gaining a ton of traction in the market to help combat fraud. Highway is a great partner to Nuvocargo and we respect them a lot!
However, fraudsters are getting more sophisticated and keep tweaking their ways to bypass these systems; this means we all need to do a lot more alongside Highway and others to keep helping prevent fraud in the industry.
Why is fraud getting worse?
Most compliance workflows in trucking haven’t changed in decades. They check if a carrier’s MC is active, if insurance is on file, and if authority looks valid. Those particular checks only confirm that a carrier exists, but not whether they’re the best or safest carrier for any particular load.
Across the industry we’ve seen:
Spoofed dispatch emails that hand freight to imposters before it even moves.
Insurance policies that look valid but are cancelled the next day.
Carriers marked “active” bidding on lanes they’re not certified to run, like California reefers without CARB approval.
Recycled MC numbers bought and sold by fraud rings, resurfacing as supposedly “new” carriers.
Current compliance workflows that both shippers and brokers use today miss all of this. It stamps a simple “pass/fail” while shippers are left exposed to fraud, denied claims, lost capacity, and reputational fallout with their own customers.
The impact is two-fold:
False negatives (fraud risk): bad actors slip through because generic checks don’t catch mismatched insurance, spoofed contacts, or recycled MCs.
False positives (lost capacity): fully qualified carriers get excluded because the system can’t tell whether a rule actually applies to that specific load.
Nuvocargo’s approach: Bid-level compliance with an AI engine screening for up to 150 signals
Legacy compliance is built around static checkboxes.
Instead, NuvoOS’ is built as an intelligent AI-powered system where agents are using AI & integrations to:
Find new possible carriers for your open loads
Get more bids per load (avg 10.6 bids per load)
Negotiating bids with AI agents via voice and email
Fraud Prevention Shield: Screening for up to 150 signals for compliance with AI on a per load and per bid basis (where most of the industry is just statically checking a carrier profile)
All of this happens fully autonomously inside NuvoOS for a large subset of our loads today.
Most carrier sales reps at brokerages are doing mountains of rote manual work just to have a list of 2-3 viable bids for any given load and to onboard a couple of carriers for a spot load.
They are manually procuring, negotiating, and then screening for compliance by logging into 7+ different platforms and doing a ton of manual work.
At Nuvocargo, our reps now log into our loadboard only to review:
a) More bids per open load (avg of 10 bids per open load) sourced automatically through integrations which leads ultimately to more capacity for shippers,
b) Lower rates as bids have already been negotiated against max buys with AI agents, and
c) Pass/fail score for compliance: powered by Fraud Prevention Shield screening for up to 150 signals for every bid & for every load. Most of the industry just periodically checks a carrier’s profile on a system like Highway and doesn’t match that against a particular load or bid.
Our compliance engine is powered by AI to review all these signals and has a four-layer system of security that makes it much harder for a fraudster to bypass our checks & balances.
If you want a detailed understanding of how we built this and how you could benefit from Nuvocargo’s AI-powered compliance engine, please book a demo with our team here.
The Results
Our compliance AI engine is running across thousands of shipments. Carriers are vetted at the bid stage, decisions are instant, and onboarding now takes minutes instead of weeks, so shippers gain speed and security without compromising capacity.
The impact so far:
0 fraud cases since launch.
Carriers onboarded in under 3 minutes, turning what used to take days or weeks into near-instant access to vetted capacity.
Up to 150 compliance signals checked per load, with only the relevant subset applied, from lane-specific certifications to VIN-level insurance validation.
4 layers of security: AI reasoning, live data integrations, carrier sales review, and compliance team review.
Automatic and autonomous refresh of contact graph carrier identity, insurance, and operating status, so approvals stay current and trusted capacity remains truly usable.
If you want a demo of how we’re significantly reducing carrier fraud and accelerating freight procurement in North America with AI, please book a demo of Nuvo OS (our AI native operating system for North America freight).