Highway looks to become the ‘Plaid for Freight’ as cargo theft goes direct

The freight industry stands at a crossroads that looks remarkably familiar to anyone who remembers the early days of fintech. Before Plaid became the connective tissue linking bank accounts to lending decisions, borrowers shuffled paperwork and lenders operated on good faith.

Now that same transformation is coming for trucking, and Highway’s Chief Commercial Officer Michael Caney believes Highway is building the rails that will make it happen. “Highway is Plaid,” Caney told FreightWaves in an interview.

“Highway is allowing a user, a carrier user, to say: ‘We’re asking the question — are you willing to tell the truth about who you are? And are you willing to let the world know if something changes?’ And when they’re not, that’s a tell.” The Changing State of Freight Fraud The nature of cargo theft has shifted dramatically.

Double-brokering schemes, once the dominant threat, have given way to direct theft. This shift is partly due to identity verification tools from Highway and others that have made impersonation more difficult. “The reason that we see direct theft rising is because it’s no longer easy to impersonate a carrier,” Caney said. “We’ve made it harder.

You actually have to be picking up freight for a while.” The challenge now lies in detecting when legitimate carriers “break bad.” Highway monitors roughly 2.

5 million loads a month, watching for behavioral anomalies that signal trouble: a five-truck operation suddenly booking 100 loads, unfamiliar carriers moving into high-value commodity lanes, or sudden spikes in user additions. “There are things that you can detect where you say, ‘Man, that guy’s gonna start stealing freight soon,’” Caney said.

“We geocode facilities, so we look at the propensity of a commodity or a facility or a traffic lane, and we look for carriers to move into that lane that maybe haven’t been there before.” Chameleon carriers, those operations that shed identities to escape enforcement history are another persistent threat.

But Caney argues detection is straightforward when carriers must verify principal ownership through facial recognition, provide real names without virtual private network masking and match vehicle identification numbers on electronic logging devices against scheduled auto policies. “Not all electronic logging device providers are created equal,” Caney said.

Highway has begun shutting off data feeds from providers that fail its integrity standards, telling one recently: “If you don’t change the way that you send data, we’re gonna say that any connected ELD through this particular provider is no good and brokers shouldn’t trust it.”

The Economics of Fraud and Market Incentives Behind the fraud epidemic lies an uncomfortable economic reality. For years, shippers squeezed rates to the point where some brokerages operate on 3 to 4 percent gross margins. This isn’t earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, but actual gross margin.

“When shippers [were] providing the rates, and there’s some brokerages operating out there at 3 and 4 percent gross margin — barely breaking even, they’re just trying to stay in business — their incentive alignment’s off,” Caney said. “Shippers have pushed it till it’s breaking.” That pressure cascades downward. Carriers can’t afford compliance investments.

Non-domiciled and limited-term commercial driver’s license (CDL) holders account for a disproportionate share of stolen loads. Fraud itself has become professionalized, requiring more working capital to operate. This means bad actors must target higher-value shipments to cover their costs. “Fraud’s a business,” Caney said.

“It’s organized, it is well thought out, there’s technology behind it, and it now costs more to run a fraud business.” Enforceable Standards vs. Data Commentary Caney offered five key points during a recent conference appearance. One stood out: “Data shows you risk, but it doesn’t prevent it.”

The solution, he argues, lies in making the transaction itself the enforcement mechanism. When a broker books a carrier with a connected ELD that auto-assigns to the load based on proximity. It then verifies the vehicle identification number against the scheduled auto policy and uses a secure rate confirmation conduit that prevents inbox interception.

The added steps means theft drops to zero. “When someone comes and says, ‘We’ll create the standards like a Visa,’ and you choose to trade outside those standards, you’re choosing risk,” Caney said. He compared it to a renter offering to pay outside Airbnb for a discount: the platform’s guarantees disappear the moment you step off the rails.

A Trusted Freight Exchange to Rebuild Trust Highway’s Trusted Freight Exchange has scaled rapidly since launch. John Tozer, who oversees the platform, said it has become the second-largest freight marketplace in roughly seven months, with 250 to 300 integrated customers posting upward of 60,000 available loads daily.

“The trust in the Trusted Freight Exchange is more