Fraud prevention-focused Highway leads FreightTech 25

Freight industry leaders and experts crowned Highway as the top company in the highly anticipated 2025 FreightWaves FreightTech 25, recognizing the most innovative players in the freight technology space.

Based in Dallas, Highway has redefined carrier identity management and fraud prevention in the trucking sector. Under the leadership of founder and CEO Jordan Graft, the company has developed a multilayered approach to combat evolving challenges like identity theft, double brokering and cybercrime.

Highway’s carrier identity engine enhances trust and efficiency by enabling freight brokers to onboard carriers securely while tailoring risk assessments to specific freight types.

In June, Graft spoke at FreightWaves’ Future of Supply Chain event in Atlanta, emphasizing Highway’s dedication to empowering brokers: “We serve one master: brokers,” he said. “It’s our mission to make them better and the heroes of this industry.”

Fraud Prevention 101

Circle Logistics Senior Vice President Andrew Smith shares insights on establishing a culture of fraud prevention that you can use in your business.

FREIGHTWAVES: What foundational steps should a brokerage take to establish a culture of fraud prevention?

SMITH: First and foremost, bringing awareness to the entire organization and stressing the importance of each individual’s due diligence is key. Even though we assumed everyone was diligent, it wasn’t until after multiple all-hands meetings and training that every single issue, no matter the size, was brought to the table.

Creating a centralized team or subject matter expert to report all types of potential fraud to is imperative — brokerages face over 10 types of fraud that touch every single department, and you can’t measure or implement new procedures without centralizing the issues within your organization.

FREIGHTWAVES: How do you ensure buy-in from all levels of the organization?

SMITH: My favorite tool to get organizational buy-in is to create a “committee” that involves one representative from each department and in each role as early as possible. If you involve people in the discovery or design process, they will naturally take interest and ownership much before a solution is presented to the company.

You can’t achieve buy-in by just releasing new tech or standard operating processes and expecting people to follow suit. Creating an incentive and reward structure is also crucial and much more effective than focusing on “repercussions” — this creates excitement over fear.

FREIGHTWAVES: What operational changes are most critical to implementing effective fraud prevention practices, and how do these impact daily workflows?

SMITH: The most critical fraud prevention juncture occurs at the point of sale, when booking a load or taking on a new customer. The extra step of customer or carrier verification slows down the sales cycle but for full adoption needs to be as streamlined as possible.

Balancing speed with accuracy is difficult, so I recommend a solid continuing education process with an open-format Q&A that can help overcome any obstacles.

Also, keep in mind that one-size-fits-all solutions may do more harm than good. Properly identify the risk at both the load and customer level so that you can tailor protections for higher-value or higher-targeted shipments, such as targeted lanes and commodities.

FREIGHTWAVES: How do you educate and empower employees to recognize and respond to potential fraud without creating inefficiencies or fear of making mistakes?

SMITH: Our chief mission is to find personalized solutions for our customers, and in order to do so, we have to create personalized solutions for our logistics operations.

By ensuring robust employee education about what fraud looks like, where it comes from and why it happens, you can then incorporate fraud prevention technology into the ecosystem that leads to an environment where fraud prevention is possible without creating unnecessary barriers.

Because of this, our people feel empowered, based on their training, to make decisions where they can, and trust the hard stops where they must. We’ve even gone as far as launching fake phishing email campaigns on our own staff to ensure they learned from the training, empower those who succeed and re-address those who haven’t.

FREIGHTWAVES: What role does technology play in detecting and preventing fraud, and how do you balance automated solutions with human oversight?

SMITH: We adopted almost every fraud-related FreightTech out there, and they all played a part in one way or another. Highway certainly has the greatest impact on us completely knocking out fraud, but tech alone doesn’t solve the issue.

We rely on technology to hard-block our red flags and empower humans to make decisions with a “yellow flag” report that takes in dozens of data points to identify potential risks that then get reviewed by a human.

We also rely on our fraud prevention team to actively search for data points: emails, URLs, phone numbers, incident reports, GPS pings, spoofing alerts and associations that we block proactively before they attempt to contact us.

Our road to fraud prevention was long, tiresome and costly, but after fighting the battle for over two years, we have moved over 100,000 shipments without issue.

It’s a never-ending battle, and by no means are we finished.

Even though the problem is much wider and deeper than ever before, the root sources of fraud in terms of how they get access to a broker are actually fairly limited. If you put the bulk of your efforts there, it’s entirely possible for the brokerage community to solve these issues.

Guy Fieri’s biggest burn yet

Celebrity chef Guy Fieri and rock legend Sammy Hagar are reeling after two trucks carrying $1 million worth of their Santo Spirits tequila were stolen in Laredo, Texas, in a suspected organized crime heist.

Investigators revealed the trucks were double-brokered to unauthorized carriers, who likely used GPS spoofing to mislead authorities. The theft included 24,240 bottles of their signature tequila, including an exclusive extra añejo that had aged 39 months.

Authorities continue to investigate, and Fieri has offered a $10,000 reward for tips.