The attack patterns behind strategic theft are well known. Impersonation. Compromised email accounts. Forged paperwork. Bought or leased MCs. Social engineering over phone or text. On the surface, these schemes look different. In practice, they all rely on the same underlying weakness.
They exploit how difficult it is, in the middle of execution, to reliably tie a request to three things: who is making it, who they represent, and whether they are authorized to ask for that change right now. When any of those links are ambiguous, judgment fills the gap.
That shared weakness is what this series refers to as the gap. It appears everywhere operations teams recognize as “routine but risky”: reroutes, driver swaps, delivery changes, equipment substitutions, and the countless “just confirming this is okay” moments that don’t look dangerous until they are.
One reason the gap is so persistent is that proof of authorization doesn’t live in a single place. There is no canonical source of truth. Identity, representation, and approval are scattered across company boundaries, systems, and conversations. What matters at the point of execution is rarely visible there.
Operations teams already do due diligence — at onboarding. Companies are verified. Insurance is checked. MC numbers, contacts, and scorecards are reviewed. That diligence is effective for establishing who should be allowed to do what under normal conditions.
The gap isn’t in setup. It’s in execution.
During execution, the burden silently shifts. Frontline teams are asked to re-establish trust again, but now under time pressure, with incomplete context, and while work has to keep moving. The same questions resurface — “Is this real?” “Is this allowed?” — but the systems that answered them during onboarding are no longer in reach.
This is where the gap gets exploited. There is a crucial difference between checking paperwork and verifying that a request is legitimate, authorized, and current. That second step is due diligence — but it’s being performed ad hoc, by the approver, at the worst possible moment.
This isn’t a process failure. It’s a mismatch of responsibility. The requester is the one introducing uncertainty, yet the approver is forced to resolve it. Fraud and costly mistakes succeed precisely because they push the burden of proof downstream, onto people who are time-constrained, context-limited, and incentivized to keep operations moving.
Under pressure, humans don’t verify perfectly. They infer. They shortcut. They proceed.
The gap persists because the system asks the wrong party to prove legitimacy, and asks them to do it when the perceived cost of delay feels higher than the perceived cost of being wrong.
That is why this series exists.
Its purpose is not to catalog attack types or assign blame. It is to make this gap visible, because recognizing it is foundational to improving how freight operations actually run. Every entry builds on the same premise: reduce ambiguity, anchor requests to identity, and replace improvised due diligence with explicit proof.
Only once that shift is understood does it become possible to talk about method, infrastructure, and change — without defaulting back to judgment under pressure.
Trust Infrastructure for Freight