Freight volume doesn’t ramp up gradually this time of year. Back-to-school restocking runs into retail peak-season prep, and by October, holiday freight is already moving. For brokers, that means more loads, tighter capacity, and less time to double-check the carrier on the other end of the phone. The data backs up what most brokers already feel: Fraud activity climbs in the fall and keeps climbing into the holidays.
Why the season creates the opening
Freight peak season typically runs August through October, the tightest sustained stretch of the year, as back-to-school restocking overlaps with early holiday inventory builds. A second surge follows in November and December. During the 2025 holiday period, tender rejection rates topped 13 percent and spot rates rose nearly 19 percent versus mid-November, a sign of how fast capacity tightens once back-to-school demand rolls into the holiday rush.
IDScan.net found cargo and logistics fraud attempts surging in recent years, with the sharpest spikes tied to seasonal hiring peaks and high-volume shipping periods. Highway Freight Fraud Index found fraud attempts up 219 percent year over year in Q3 2025, right as brokers enter peak season, with 48,700-plus fake carrier identities flagged that quarter and average losses per cargo theft topping $219,000.
What tends to show up this time of year
A handful of schemes account for most of the peak-season fraud brokers report, and they tend to cluster together during high-volume months:
- Carrier identity theft. A legitimate carrier’s MC number, DOT number, or company name gets used by someone else. The paperwork checks out, but the truck that shows up, or doesn’t, isn’t run by the company you booked.
- Double-brokering. A load gets re-brokered without authorization, often several times, until the broker of record has no real visibility into who’s hauling it or who’s accountable if something goes wrong.
- Fictitious pickups. A load gets booked, sometimes picked up, then vanishes. Overhaul found deceptive pickup schemes using forged credentials up 31 percent year over year in early 2026, and Verisk CargoNet put industrywide cargo-theft losses at nearly $725 million in 2025, up 60 percent from 2024.
Raising the bar on verification this season
The fix isn’t slowing down. It’s tightening specific checks so they hold up even at peak volume:
- Verify carrier authority and insurance every time, not just for new carriers. Reactivated or recently transferred authority is one of the more reliable red flags.
- Call the carrier back on a number you look up independently, not the one on the load confirmation or a forwarded email.
- Watch for last-minute changes to banking or remittance details, one of the most common signs a carrier’s identity has been compromised.
- Confirm equipment and driver details match what was booked
- Treat a mid-transit carrier change or rebooking with no clear explanation as a reason to stop and verify.
None of these steps take long individually. Skipped together under deadline pressure, they’re exactly how fraud gets through.
Lock down your own credentials
Verifying carriers only helps if your own systems aren’t the weak point. Highway’s data points to compromised inboxes and email phishing as a top vector fraudsters use to intercept rate confirmations and redirect freight, so login hygiene is part of the same defense:
- Turn on multi-factor authentication for every email, TMS, and load board account logins.
- Use unique passwords per system, especially carrier portals and rate confirmation tools; reused passwords turn one phishing hit into a full account takeover.
- Treat a request to add an MFA device, change recovery info, or reset a password like a remittance-detail change: pause and verify through a channel you control first.
The trade-off worth making
An extra five minutes of verification costs less than one fraudulent load. The brokers who come out of the fall surge in the best shape aren’t the ones who moved fastest. They’re the ones who kept their verification steps, and their own account security, intact when volume made it tempting to skip them.
Build in the extra checks now, while you still have the bandwidth to make them a habit. It’s easier to hold the line in September than to rebuild trust in December after something’s gone wrong.
