White paper · Part 2 of 4
Why traditional carrier verification fails
Traditional verification confirms that a document exists. It does not confirm that the party using it is who they claim to be, or that the document itself hasn’t been altered, cloned or issued to someone else.
A process built for a different threat
The logistics sector operates under significant time and cost constraints. Carrier selection and onboarding often have to be completed within a very short timeframe to avoid delaying transport operations.
At the same time, carrier verification still relies largely on manual checks of transport licences, insurance certificates and company registration extracts. In parallel, criminals operate in a digital and AI-enabled environment, using those technologies to create highly convincing false identities that manual checks were never designed to detect.
Eight structural weaknesses
- Time constraints. Limited verification — or none at all — is precisely what criminals exploit.
- Manual, judgement-based review. An operator under time pressure, reviewing a PDF, is not equipped to detect font substitution, metadata tampering or a cloned template. The documents are also often in a foreign language.
- Documents checked in isolation. A licence can look perfectly valid on its own while belonging to a different company than the one requesting the load. Isolation prevents cross-checking.
- No verification against the issuing authority. Checking the transport licence, registration extract or VAT number against the source register is what confirms a document is not only official-looking, but confirmed official.
- Static, one-time checks. Verification typically happens once, at onboarding. Insurance lapses, licences expire, ownership changes, and companies get flagged for sanctions long after onboarding.
- No digital identity verification. The email domain, phone number and website behind a carrier are rarely examined, even though these are now the primary attack surface for business email compromise and identity theft.
- No shared fraud intelligence. Compromise repeats: the same fraudulent email domains, phone numbers and document templates are reused across multiple victims. Without a shared intelligence layer, every company relearns the same fraud independently — usually after being victimised.
- Coverage gaps by design. The layers above are not isolated failures; together they leave the whole digital and behavioural side of a carrier’s identity unchecked.
Three questions, one answer
Traditional verification confirms that a document exists. It does not confirm that the party using it is who they claim to be, or that the document itself hasn’t been altered, cloned or issued to someone else.
These are three separate questions, and legacy processes generally answer only the first.
Adapted from the Vectys white paper “Preventing freight diversion”, August 2026.
Provided for informational and guidance purposes only. It outlines general principles, best practices and potential risk mitigation approaches, and does not constitute legal advice, compliance advice, or a guarantee of fraud prevention, regulatory compliance or operational risk elimination.