What is double brokering, and is it illegal?

What federal law says

Under 49 U.S.C. 14916, a person may provide interstate brokerage services only if it is registered with FMCSA, complies with that registration, and has met the broker financial security requirements. A person who knowingly authorizes, consents to or permits a violation is liable for a civil penalty of up to $10,000 for each violation and to the injured party for all valid claims, regardless of amount.

For a property broker, the financial security is a $75,000 surety bond or trust fund. In its June 2023 guidance, FMCSA said that, because of a statutory omission, it could not assess civil penalties under section 14916 itself and could pursue them only through the Department of Justice in federal court.

Not every handoff is brokering. A motor carrier is not acting as a broker when it arranges a shipment it is authorized to transport and has accepted and legally bound itself to transport. Whether a particular case is unlawful brokerage depends on the facts and on your contract, so get legal advice for a specific dispute.

How it usually happens

The FBI describes criminals who take over a real carrier’s accounts, accept real shipments in its name, double-broker the loads to drivers who are partly unaware, provide manipulated bills of lading and change the destination. The loads are then cross-docked or transloaded to complicit drivers and resold.

In that pattern the driver who shows up may be honest, and the carrier you booked may never touch the load. A re-brokered load can also deliver normally, but even then you have lost control over who carried your customer’s freight, on what insurance, and who expects to be paid.

Signs a load has been double-brokered

• The truck at pickup shows a different company name or USDOT number than the carrier on your rate confirmation. Federal rules require a commercial truck to display the operating carrier’s legal or trade name and its USDOT number.
• The driver says they were hired by a company you have never heard of.
• The carrier you booked cannot be reached on the phone number on its FMCSA record, or says it never took the load.
• The company you booked holds broker authority only on the SAFER Snapshot.
• Changes to the bill of lading or the delivery address that did not come from your customer.

How to prevent it

1. Check the company’s record on SAFER: carrier authority, an active USDOT status and no out-of-service date. What a broker MC number means.
2. Confirm the booking by calling the carrier on the phone number on its record.
3. Put a clause in your carrier agreement and rate confirmation that the carrier must haul the load itself and may not re-broker, assign or interline it without your written consent.
4. Get the driver’s name and the truck and trailer numbers before pickup, and have the shipper compare them with the truck that arrives.
5. At pickup, document the driver, license, vehicle, plates and DOT and MC numbers, as the FBI recommends.
6. Track the load and take check calls from the driver, not from a third party.
7. Pay only the carrier on your rate confirmation, and confirm any change to its payment details by calling its listed number.

What to watch out for

• A “dispatcher” who books loads for many carriers. FMCSA’s 2023 guidance lists accepting a shipment without a truck and soliciting the open market of carriers as signs that a dispatch service is acting as a broker.
• Your own load posted again on a load board after you covered it, which can mean the carrier is reselling it.
• A carrier packet that arrives from a free email address or a look-alike domain, two of the signs the FBI lists.
• A load that has gone missing. What to do if a load gets stolen.

Where to report it

If the load was stolen, report it to your local police department and to the FBI through ic3.gov or a field office. If a company brokered without authority, you can file a complaint about it in FMCSA’s National Consumer Complaint Database, which accepts complaints about transportation intermediaries.