Freight fraud is no longer a fringe problem confined to a handful of bad actors exploiting an occasional lapse in verification. It has become a well-organized, scaled operation that costs the U.S. supply chain hundreds of millions of dollars every year, and the methods are growing more sophisticated by the quarter.

According to data from Verisk CargoNet, estimated cargo theft losses surged to nearly $725 million in 2025, a 60 percent increase from 2024. Deceptive pickup schemes, which include double brokering and fictitious pickups, jumped 31 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2026 alone, according to supply chain security firm Overhaul. For importers, exporters, and logistics operators moving freight through the Port of Virginia and across Hampton Roads, understanding how these schemes work is the first step toward not becoming a target.

What Is Double Brokering?

Double brokering occurs when a criminal obtains the rights to a shipment, typically by impersonating a legitimate freight broker or carrier, and then re-brokers that load to an actual carrier without the shipper’s knowledge. The real carrier, unaware that anything illegal is happening, picks up the freight and delivers it. The criminal collects payment from the shipper, pays the carrier a fraction of that amount, and keeps the difference, or in more serious cases, arranges for the freight to disappear entirely.

What makes double brokering particularly damaging is that it exploits the trust already built into normal freight transactions. The shipper believes they are working with a vetted partner. The carrier believes they received a legitimate load booking. Neither party is immediately aware that something has gone wrong, and by the time discrepancies surface, the fraudster has moved on.

FreightWaves reporting from early 2026 noted that fraud networks frequently operate through multiple interconnected entities, where one company secures the load, another moves it under a different authority, and a third handles payment. These networks share phone numbers, email domains, and addresses, and investigators have mapped single fraud operations to dozens of shell entities.

What Is a Fictitious Pickup?

A fictitious pickup is exactly what it sounds like. A criminal arrives at a shipper’s facility with forged documentation, including a fake or cloned bill of lading, counterfeit driver credentials, and sometimes a cloned carrier identity complete with a matching MC number and insurance certificate. The dock worker, seeing paperwork that appears legitimate, releases the freight. The truck drives away, and the cargo is gone.

These schemes often involve identity theft at the carrier level. According to Highway’s Q3 2025 Freight Fraud Index, 149 unauthorized FMCSA contact record changes were made in that quarter alone, meaning fraudsters successfully altered the official contact information of legitimate, registered carriers in the federal database. When a broker or shipper called to verify the carrier, they may have been speaking directly to the fraudster.

For port-adjacent freight, fictitious pickups carry elevated risk. Containers released from the terminal after customs clearance move quickly, and the coordination between the terminal, the trucker, and the consignee happens under time pressure. Criminals who understand how port drayage works, including the structure of dispatch, release orders, and gate procedures, are specifically targeting this vulnerability.

How the Most Common Freight Fraud Schemes Compare

The following table summarizes the four most active fraud methods targeting carriers, brokers, and shippers in the current environment.

Why Port-Adjacent Freight Is a Specific Target

Port freight moves on compressed timelines. Demurrage clocks are running, cargo needs to clear customs, and shippers are often communicating with multiple parties simultaneously. That urgency creates pressure that fraudsters exploit deliberately. A shipper who receives a call from someone claiming to represent the booked carrier, asking to confirm pickup details ahead of a last-free-day deadline, may not apply the same scrutiny they would under normal conditions.

High-value cargo categories are also concentrated at ports. Electronics, pharmaceuticals, food and beverage imports, and apparel, all of which rank among the most frequently targeted freight types according to Overhaul’s Q1 2026 Cargo Theft Report, regularly move through facilities like Norfolk International Terminal and Virginia International Gateway. Cargo that can be quickly liquidated is cargo that criminal networks prioritize.

The Trojan Driver Scam, documented by TAPA Americas in April 2026, adds another dimension. Rather than attacking from the outside through forged credentials, criminals embed themselves inside legitimate carrier operations by applying for driver positions. Once hired, they have access to real dispatch instructions, real load assignments, and real equipment. The theft looks organic from the outside because the driver is, in fact, employed by the carrier.

The Federal Response: The SAFER Transport Act

The scale of the problem has reached Congress. On February 26, 2026, U.S. Senator Todd Young introduced the Securing American Freight, Enforcement, and Reliability in Transport Act, known as the SAFER Transport Act. The bill specifically names fictitious pickups, double brokering, and hostage loads as the tactics it is designed to address.

Among the bill’s provisions is the establishment of a Freight Fraud and Theft Advisory Committee under the Secretary of Transportation. The legislation reflects what the industry has been reporting for two years: that existing enforcement mechanisms are not keeping pace with the sophistication and scale of organized cargo crime.

What Shippers and Cargo Owners Can Do Right Now

No technology platform or federal legislation eliminates fraud exposure on its own. The most effective protection comes from consistent practices at the operational level. The following steps are recommended by industry organizations including the National Insurance Crime Bureau, TAPA Americas, and the Transportation Intermediaries Association:

• Verify carrier identity independently. Never rely solely on contact information provided in an email or load confirmation. Look up the carrier directly through FMCSA using the MC number provided, and call the number listed on the FMCSA record, not the number in the email. If the numbers differ, treat it as a red flag.
• Screen for VoIP phone numbers. Fraudulent carrier contacts frequently use VoIP numbers because they can be created quickly and abandoned. Several carrier vetting platforms flag VoIP numbers automatically. Manual checks are also possible through reverse-lookup tools.
• Confirm pickup details through a second channel. If a driver arrives ahead of schedule, with slightly different paperwork, or asks to change the pickup address, do not release the freight until confirmation is received through a separately verified channel. A phone call to a number you dialed, not one provided by the driver, is the minimum standard.
• Work with carriers who do not permit double brokering. Some carriers and brokers have explicit contractual prohibitions on re-brokering loads. Choosing partners with these policies in place and with verifiable operating histories reduces exposure significantly.
• Document the authorization chain. Any re-routing instruction, address change, or carrier substitution should come in writing from the verified cargo owner and no one else. Accepting verbal changes or instructions relayed through dispatch creates gaps that fraudsters are trained to exploit.
• For hazmat drayage and other regulated cargo, apply additional verification at every transfer point. Regulated freight that moves under specific permits and documentation creates a paper trail that, if followed consistently, makes fictitious pickups significantly harder to execute.

Choosing Partners Who Take Cargo Security Seriously

At Century Express Virginia, every driver working a port move is known to the team. The company has operated from the Port of Virginia since 2007, and its driver network reflects the lowest turnover rates in the region. That continuity matters in the current environment. When the same drivers are running the same terminals week after week, anomalies are noticed. Unfamiliar faces, mismatched paperwork, and unusual pickup requests stand out to a team that knows its routes and relationships well.

Fraud in freight is ultimately an identity problem. It thrives where verification is assumed rather than confirmed. Shippers and cargo owners who take carrier verification seriously, maintain tight documentation practices, and work with port-based operators who have deep terminal relationships are in a significantly stronger position than those who do not.

For questions about how Century Express Virginia manages cargo security across its port drayage, refrigerated drayage, and specialized equipment operations, visit the About page or explore the full range of services on the Century Express Virginia website.

Let Century Express Virginia help you navigate the security challenges of port logistics. The team is accessible seven days a week at (757) 494-9200, or reach out through the contact page.

The trucking industry is facing a workforce challenge that has been building for years, and 2026 marks a turning point. After several years of relative stability in driver availability, the United States has officially entered another driver shortage cycle. For shippers moving cargo through the Port of Virginia, understanding this shift is essential to maintaining reliable supply chains.

At Century Express Virginia, we have called the Port of Virginia home since 2007. Our team has seen freight markets rise and fall, regulations come and go, and capacity swing from surplus to scarcity. The current driver shortage is different from previous cycles because it combines demographic pressures, regulatory changes, and a tightening freight market all at once. Here is what shippers need to know and how to prepare.

The Numbers Behind the Shortage

The American Trucking Associations estimates the current driver shortfall at approximately 82,000 positions nationwide. That number has been climbing steadily since the pandemic disruption, and recent revisions to Bureau of Labor Statistics data revealed the freight recession was deeper than previously understood. The industry lost roughly 122,000 positions from its October 2022 peak, and the recovery is happening into a labor market that simply cannot keep pace.

More than 39,000 carriers and nearly 50,000 drivers have exited the market since 2022. For shippers at the Port of Virginia, this means fewer trucks competing for loads and more pressure on the carriers that remain. The math is straightforward: when driver supply shrinks and freight demand grows, capacity tightens and rates follow.

Regulatory Changes Are Accelerating the Gap

The shortage is not purely demographic. A federal rule that took effect in March 2026 now prohibits asylum seekers, refugees, and DACA recipients from obtaining or renewing commercial driver’s licenses. Foreign-born drivers account for nearly one in six truckers in the United States, and this policy change removes a significant portion of the potential workforce.

Smaller fleets are particularly exposed. Roughly 92% of trucking companies operate ten trucks or fewer, and many of these operations rely on immigrant drivers to fill seats. When combined with stricter English language proficiency enforcement across state lines and tighter CDL licensing standards in multiple states, the regulatory environment is shrinking the available driver pool faster than recruitment efforts can offset.

For port drayage operations specifically, this matters because drayage requires drivers with specialized knowledge of terminal procedures, chassis management, and the coordination required to move containers efficiently. Losing experienced drayage drivers is not easily remedied by hiring long-haul truckers unfamiliar with port operations.

Capacity Is Tightening Across the Board

The freight market has moved out of its multi-year bottoming phase into an early-cycle environment where tightening capacity is pushing rates higher. According to industry data tracked by FreightWaves and DAT Freight and Analytics, truckload spot and contract rates hit two-year highs in March 2026. National linehaul spot rates are running approximately 27% above year-prior levels as of early May.

The Outbound Tender Rejection Index, which measures how often carriers reject contracted loads in favor of higher-paying alternatives, reached 14.2% in March 2026. A year earlier, that figure sat at 8.5%. When carriers reject more contracted freight, it signals they have better options elsewhere, typically on the spot market. For shippers, this means route guides built on last year’s pricing may no longer hold.

Regional imbalances are becoming more pronounced. The Southeast, Texas, and parts of the Mountain West are experiencing the sharpest capacity constraints. Virginia, as a major East Coast logistics hub with direct Atlantic access and strong rail connectivity, sits in a region where these pressures are building. Shippers who have relied on abundant capacity and competitive rates will need to adapt their strategies.

The Workforce Is Aging Faster Than It Is Being Replaced

Beyond regulations and market cycles, a structural demographic issue underpins this shortage. The average age of a U.S. truck driver is approximately 46 years old. The industry will need to hire roughly 1.2 million new drivers over the next decade just to replace retirees and keep pace with freight demand. That works out to approximately 120,000 new drivers per year.

Large truckload carriers still report annual driver turnover rates between 90 and 95 percent. More concerning, 35 percent of newly hired drivers quit within their first 90 days. The pipeline of qualified replacements has not kept pace with departures, and the demographic curve will continue to tighten capacity and sustain elevated rates well into the next freight cycle.

At Century Express Virginia, we have worked hard to build a different kind of operation. Our owner-operators are the heart of our company, and we are proud to have the lowest turnover rates for drivers in the region. We offer competitive pay, comprehensive benefits, and a commitment to investing in both our drivers and our equipment. When drivers stay, service quality remains consistent, and shippers benefit from experienced professionals who know the Port of Virginia inside and out.

What This Means for Port of Virginia Shippers

For importers, exporters, beneficial cargo owners, and third-party logistics providers moving freight through Virginia’s marine terminals, the driver shortage has practical implications worth addressing now rather than later.

Drayage availability may tighten. As the driver pool shrinks, carriers become more selective about the freight they accept. Shippers with challenging pickup windows, frequent detention issues, or inconsistent volume may find it harder to secure reliable drayage capacity. Working with an established carrier that has strong relationships within the port community becomes more valuable when trucks are in short supply.

Rates are likely to continue climbing. Spot rates have posted seven consecutive months of gains, and contract rates are following. Shippers still operating on pricing negotiated during the freight recession may face sticker shock when renewing agreements. Building yard storage flexibility into your supply chain can help avoid demurrage charges when drayage capacity is temporarily constrained.

Service reliability matters more than ever. When capacity is tight, carriers can afford to be selective about who they work with. Shippers that offer fast load times, flexible scheduling, and consistent volume will receive priority over those that do not. The hidden costs of a tight market are often worse than the visible ones: missed appointments, detention fees, and last-minute spot coverage that accumulates when planned capacity disappears.

Strategies for Navigating the Shortage

Shippers can take several practical steps to protect their supply chains as the driver shortage deepens.

Prioritize relationships over transactions. Contract relationships with trusted carriers provide stability that spot market dependency cannot match. When capacity tightens, carriers honor commitments to partners they know and trust. At Century Express Virginia, we have built our reputation on relationships, leveraging our extensive network within the port community to efficiently manage cargo through Virginia’s marine terminals.

Make your freight attractive to carriers. In a tight market, drivers and carriers have options. Facilities with quick turn times, reasonable appointment windows, and professional treatment of drivers will secure capacity more easily than those with reputations for delays. If your warehouse has chronic detention issues, addressing them now will pay dividends when capacity constraints peak.

Build flexibility into your supply chain. Consider how transloading services can provide alternatives when direct drayage capacity is constrained. Transferring cargo between containers and trailers at a facility near the port can reduce reliance on specific equipment types and create scheduling flexibility. Our transloading services, combined with drayage and customer service, make Century Express Virginia a one-stop solution for shippers who need options.

Plan for refrigerated and hazmat complexity. Specialized freight faces additional pressure because the driver pool for refrigerated drayage and hazmat drayage is smaller than the general trucking workforce. Drivers with hazmat endorsements or reefer experience are particularly valuable, and capacity for these services will tighten faster than standard dry freight. Building longer lead times into shipments requiring specialized handling will help avoid last-minute scrambles.

Leverage rail connections. Hampton Roads benefits from excellent rail connectivity with good transit times and well-run ramp operations. Rail drayage can provide cost-effective alternatives for freight moving to or from inland destinations. As a UIIA member with financial bonds in place with the railroads, Century Express Virginia can help shippers tap into intermodal options that reduce dependence on over-the-road trucking.

Heavy Cargo Requires Additional Planning

Shippers moving overweight or oversized containers face unique challenges in a tight driver market. Heavy cargo permitting requires specialized equipment and drivers familiar with permit requirements. We maintain blanket permits in Virginia and can secure permits in surrounding states when needed. Our fleet of specialized equipment, including 20/40 triaxles, flatbeds, and step decks, ensures we can handle even the heaviest containerized cargo.

When driver availability is constrained, having a carrier with the right equipment already in place becomes critical. Shippers who need to source specialized chassis or permitted drivers on short notice will find fewer options and higher costs.

The Century Express Virginia Perspective

Since 2007, we have built our business on the belief that attitude makes the difference. Our team brings diverse backgrounds in ocean carriers, air freight, domestic transportation, and brokerage. We leverage these abilities to provide solutions that keep freight moving, even when market conditions turn challenging.

The driver shortage is real, and its effects will be felt throughout the freight industry for years to come. But shippers who prepare now, building relationships with reliable carriers, creating supply chain flexibility, and treating drivers and carriers as partners rather than commodities, will navigate this cycle better than those who wait.

We are accessible seven days a week and are here to assist you with moving your freight through the Port of Virginia. Whether you need port drayage, specialized equipment, transloading, or yard storage, our team is ready to work for you.

Interested in how Century Express Virginia can help you navigate the changing freight market? Contact our team today and let us put our Port of Virginia expertise to work for your supply chain!

AI is capturing logistics expertise faster than most companies realize. Here is what port drayage carriers and shippers should understand about the shift.

Artificial intelligence tools have moved from novelty to daily infrastructure across the transportation and logistics industry. Route optimization, dispatch automation, load matching, predictive maintenance, and documentation workflows are all areas where AI is now embedded in how freight moves. Most carriers and shippers view this as straightforward productivity progress. But a deeper question is starting to surface: when AI learns from your team, who actually owns what it learned?

A recent Wall Street Journal piece raised this question in the context of corporate workplaces, and the answer it arrived at applies just as directly to the port drayage and trucking world. The expertise your team builds over years of working a terminal, managing chassis shortages, anticipating demurrage windows, and solving problems that never appear in a manual is being absorbed by the platforms you use. And in many cases, it is becoming the platform’s asset, not yours.

The Expertise Problem in Port Logistics

In drayage, institutional knowledge is a real competitive advantage. Knowing when Norfolk International Terminal gate queues back up, which chassis pools run short after a large vessel call, how to sequence container pulls to avoid detention, or which contacts to call when a container goes on hold are not skills you find in a textbook. They are built through experience, relationships, and years of working the Port of Virginia.

When that knowledge gets entered into an AI-assisted dispatch system, a load management platform, or a customer communication tool, the system records it. It learns from the patterns your team creates. The prompts, the decisions, the workarounds, and the successful approaches all feed back into the platform’s model. Over time, the system becomes more capable, not because it was programmed with your expertise, but because your team taught it.

This is useful in the short term. But as the WSJ piece points out, it raises a legitimate long-term question for anyone whose value is tied to what they know.

What This Means for Carriers

For trucking companies and drayage carriers, the practical implications fall into two areas.

The first is workforce. Experienced drivers and dispatchers carry terminal-specific knowledge that takes years to develop. When AI tools absorb that knowledge through daily use, the value of an individual’s expertise within the organization shifts. The system can surface answers that once required a phone call to the right person. That is efficient, but it changes the relationship between experienced employees and the companies that employ them. Carriers who are building a culture of retention need to think carefully about how they are capturing and deploying institutional knowledge, and whether their team understands what is happening.

The second is vendor dependency. If your routing decisions, dispatch logic, and customer communication patterns are all being learned by a third-party platform, the cost of switching that platform rises over time. The tool knows how your operation works. Walking away from it means starting over on the learning curve your team already paid to build. This is worth considering when evaluating technology contracts and long-term platform commitments.

What This Means for Shippers and 3PLs

For shippers, BCOs, and third-party logistics providers (3PLs) managing freight through the Port of Virginia, the question is slightly different but equally relevant. When you work with a carrier who uses AI-assisted tools for scheduling, tracking, and communication, the patterns of your freight, your preferences, your exceptions, and your escalation behaviors are all potentially being learned by that system.

That is not inherently a problem. Better pattern recognition can mean better service. But it is worth understanding what data your carriers are capturing about your freight operations, how it is being used, and whether it is contributing to a platform that benefits your operation specifically or a general model that benefits the platform’s entire customer base.

The Human Expertise That AI Cannot Absorb

There is a boundary to what AI platforms can learn from transactional data, and it matters for how carriers and shippers should think about their teams.

Relationship-based problem solving at the Port of Virginia does not fully translate into system data. Knowing the right contact to call at Virginia International Gateway when a container is misdirected, understanding the informal communication that happens between terminal staff and experienced drivers, or being trusted enough to get a situation prioritized during a congested vessel call period are capabilities that come from human relationships built over time. They generate outcomes in the real world, but they do not generate data inputs that a platform can learn from in any meaningful way.

This is one reason Century Express Virginia has placed consistent emphasis on driver retention and team continuity since 2007. The relationships our team has built at NIT, VIG, and throughout the Port of Virginia community are not replicated by any software tool. They are the product of years of showing up, doing the work, and building trust with the people who operate the terminals. Our port drayage capability is built on that foundation, and so is everything we offer in rail drayage, refrigerated drayage, hazmat drayage, and specialized freight.

A Practical Note on AI Adoption in Logistics

AI tools are worth using. The efficiency gains in dispatch coordination, documentation management, and predictive maintenance are real, and carriers who ignore them will fall behind. The point is not to avoid the technology. It is to adopt it with clear eyes about what is being exchanged.

Your team’s expertise is a meaningful input into any AI system you use. Treating that input as valuable, understanding what happens to it contractually, and ensuring your workforce understands the dynamic are reasonable steps for any carrier or logistics operation to take before signing long-term platform agreements.

For shippers and 3PLs evaluating carriers, asking how your freight data will be used and whether your operational patterns will be shared or siloed within a platform is a fair question during the procurement process.

The logistics industry is moving fast on AI adoption, and the Port of Virginia market is no exception. Century Express Virginia will continue tracking how these tools affect port operations, carrier relationships, and the workforce that keeps freight moving through Hampton Roads. If you have questions about how we operate or want to discuss your freight needs, contact our team at (757) 494-9200 or visit our contact page.