Guide
Double brokering, and what the record can show
The load goes to a company you never hired. The insurance you checked belongs to a company that never touched the freight. Here is how that shows up in FMCSA's files — and, just as importantly, where the files stop being able to help.
What actually goes wrong
Freight is tendered to one party and quietly handed to another. Nothing about that is inherently criminal — co-brokering with disclosure and consent is ordinary business. The damage comes from the silence, because every protection the shipper arranged was arranged around the wrong company.
The insurance certificate you collected covers a company that never had the load. The carrier that did have it may be uninsured for it, may be operating on authority it does not hold, and may not be reachable when the freight does not arrive. Payment gets tangled too: the party that hauled it often has not been paid, and comes looking for the shipper.
The federal fields that disagree first
No dataset flags double brokering. What FMCSA gives you is a set of facts that should agree with each other, and a way to notice when they do not.
- Broker authority on a party acting as a broker. Someone arranging transportation rather than performing it needs broker authority. If the record says NONE, they are arranging freight they are not authorised to arrange — a fact, from the federal file, before the load moves.
- Docket-to-name mismatch. The MC number in the email should resolve to the legal name on the paperwork. This is the cheapest check available and it catches the crude version of the problem, where a real carrier’s identity is simply borrowed.
- Insurance that does not fit the work. A company presenting itself as a fleet with coverage on file at zero, or below the requirement for the freight it claims to haul, is telling you something about how the load will actually be covered.
- Authority that just came back to life. A dormant record turning active, with a new name or a new address under the same DOT number, is the shape of an identity being reused rather than a business being built.
Why the check has to repeat
A carrier vetted in March can have its authority revoked in July and nobody sends you a letter. Most of the exposure in this industry is not in the carrier you failed to check — it is in the carrier you checked correctly, months ago, and have not looked at since.
The fields worth re-reading are exactly the ones above: the three authority types, the pending-revocation flag, the insurance amount on file, and the legal name and address under the DOT number. When one of them moves, the question you asked in March has a different answer.
What a data provider cannot do for you
This site republishes federal filings and stamps them with the date they were read. It does not score carriers, rank them, or tell you who to trust — partly because that is not what the data supports, and partly because a rating is an opinion dressed as a fact, and opinions about specific companies are how data providers end up in court.
What it can do is make the underlying facts cheap to check and hard to miss: resolve a docket before the load moves, and watch the record after it does.
Questions
What is double brokering? +
A load is given to one party and then handed to another party to actually haul, without the shipper or original broker agreeing to it. The company on the paperwork is not the company on the road, which is where the insurance, the liability and the cargo all start to come apart.
Is re-brokering always fraud? +
No. Co-brokering with disclosure and consent is a normal, contractual arrangement. What makes it a problem is the absence of the disclosure — the shipper believes their freight is with the company they vetted, and it is not.
Can a lookup prove double brokering? +
No, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling something. A lookup can show you that the party arranging your freight holds no broker authority, or that the docket and the name do not match — facts that raise the question. Proving what happened to a specific load takes documents, not a database.
What do I do if I suspect it? +
Stop and confirm identity through the federal record before the freight moves further: call the number on the record rather than the one you were emailed, and check whether the party that hired the carrier holds broker authority at all. After the fact it becomes a claims and contract question, and your insurer and counsel are better placed than any data provider.