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Carrier vetting · FMCSA signals · Fraud detection

A carrier trust score on every reply — before you book anything.

Keelway scores every inbound carrier email 0–100 against FMCSA authority, insurance, and inspection data — plus the chameleon-carrier signals that FMCSA does not publish. Double brokers, shell companies, and stolen-identity emails get flagged before the coordinator touches them. The five carriers on the keel are the five who passed.

See a live demoWhat is a chameleon carrier?
0–100
trust score on every carrier email reply
Keelway scoring model, 2026
3–7%
of inbound carriers flagged in a typical book
Keelway broker data, Q1 2026
< 2s
FMCSA lookup latency per carrier reply
Keelway infrastructure, 2026

Why a manual FMCSA lookup is not a carrier vetting strategy

Most freight brokerages do some version of the same thing: a coordinator opens FMCSA Safer, types in the MC number from the email, checks that authority is Active, glances at the insurance date, and books. That workflow has three problems. First, it takes 2–4 minutes per carrier, and with 40 replies per load it never happens on most of them. Second, FMCSA Safer does not score anything — it is a data display, not a risk signal. Third, and most critically, it does not detect chameleon carriers — operators who reregister under a new MC number after an authority revocation, often within weeks. A fresh MC number looks clean on Safer. Keelway knows it is not.

The average double-brokering or load theft incident costs a brokerage $6,000–$15,000 in cargo liability, shipper credits, and coordinator hours to unwind. At $799/mo flat, blocking a single incident pays for 5,000+ loads of Keelway. See the full breakdown in our post on the anatomy of a fraudulent carrier email.

How the Keelway carrier trust score is built

Keelway's trust score is a composite of five signal layers, each weighted and calibrated per brokerage over the first 30 days of operation.

Layer 1

FMCSA operating authority

Every carrier email triggers a live FMCSA Safer lookup the moment it lands in the inbox. Operating-authority status (Active, Inactive, Revoked), interstate operating rights, and broker-authority flags are checked and scored in under two seconds. A carrier with revoked or suspended authority scores a hard zero and is immediately routed to the flag queue — the coordinator never sees them in the ranked list.
Layer 2

Insurance on file — freshness and coverage

Keelway checks the insurance expiration date and whether the carrier's liability and cargo coverage meets your brokerage's minimums. A carrier with coverage expiring in the next 14 days scores lower and surfaces a soft warning. A carrier with expired coverage scores a hard flag. Keelway re-checks insurance at acceptance and again at pickup for accepted loads.
Layer 3

Inspection and violation history

The ratio of out-of-service violations to total inspections is a proven leading indicator of cargo risk. Keelway pulls the carrier's SMS score from FMCSA, weights the vehicle and driver OOS rates, and folds the result into the trust composite. A carrier with a strong safety record gets a meaningful score boost on this layer.
Layer 4

MC-DOT identity and domain signals

Keelway cross-references the MC number, DOT number, legal name, and DBA in the email against FMCSA records. A mismatch between the name in the email signature and the FMCSA registration — a common stolen-identity signal — scores a hard flag. Email domain age is checked separately: a domain registered in the past 30 days sending carrier capacity quotes is a high-confidence fraud signal.
Layer 5

Chameleon-carrier behavioral heuristics

The most sophisticated fraud signal. Keelway flags carriers whose lane, equipment, and reply patterns match the signature of known chameleon operators — specifically, MC numbers registered within 90 days that cover lanes where an authority-revoked carrier previously operated, matched on the officers, addresses, phone numbers, and insurance policies published in FMCSA registration data. Cross-brokerage signal sharing is a roadmap item, not part of this layer today.
Layer 6

Per-brokerage calibration

Global signals do not know your book. A carrier who has covered 40 loads for you in the past year should score higher than their FMCSA-only composite suggests. Keelway watches every accept, counter, and decline in your brokerage and adjusts the per-brokerage credibility weight accordingly. The first two to four weeks are the tuning window. We do not publish a cross-customer false-positive rate — there is no install base behind a number like that yet.

Score explainability — no black box

Every trust score in the ranked carrier list is expandable. Click any score and the top three contributing signals expand inline — for example: MC registered 22 days ago, Domain registered 11 days before this reply, Insurance expiration in 9 days. No number floats alone. A coordinator who disagrees can override the flag with one click and a free-text reason, which feeds the calibration model and audits the decision permanently in the carrier record.

If you already run Highway

Keep it. Highway answers "is this carrier who they say they are" at onboarding. Keelway answers "what did this carrier quote on this load, and how does it rank against the other 39 replies." Two different questions, two different moments, and brokers who run both lose nothing by doing so.

To be clear about what does not exist yet: Keelway does not pull data from Highway. There is no live feed and no data-sharing agreement. The key-exchange seam is built and waiting on a broker key, so a direct integration is a roadmap item, not a shipped feature. Today the trust score is computed from FMCSA data, inbox-level signals, and your own carrier history — nothing more.

How trust scoring connects to the full triage workflow

The trust score does not exist in isolation. It is one of four inputs to Keelway's composite carrier ranking alongside offered rate vs. market percentile, historical lane fit from your own load history, and carrier response speed. The ranking algorithm surfaces the five carriers most worth talking to — trust-screened, priced, and lane-matched. See how the composite score works on the AI load covering page, or read how the rate extraction layer pulls structured price data from the 12 carrier email formats before the trust score is applied.

What fraud actually costs a mid-market brokerage

A single double-brokering incident typically triggers four cost centers: the cargo liability claim ($3,000–$8,000 depending on commodity and insurance deductible), the shipper credit or service failure fee ($500–$2,000), the coordinator hours to unwind the load and arrange re-coverage ($800–$1,500 in labor), and the shipper relationship cost that rarely shows up on a balance sheet but shows up in the renewal conversation. Brokerages running Keelway report that fraud incidents drop materially within the first quarter of trust-score deployment — not because fraud attempts stop, but because they are caught before they become bookings.

Fits inside your existing workflow

Keelway trust scoring activates the moment the inbox is connected — no carrier onboarding workflow changes, no whitelist to build, no FMCSA API key to manage. Coordinators see the trust badge on every row in the ranked list, colored green (above 70), yellow (40–70), or red (below 40). Flagged carriers move to a separate queue. Everything else runs through the carrier email automation pipeline as normal. Works alongside Tai, McLeod, Aljex, Revenova, Turvo, and Rose Rocket — see the full broker platform overview.

Frequently asked questions

What is a carrier trust score?+
A carrier trust score is a 0–100 composite signal that tells a freight broker how much risk a carrier email reply carries before the load is booked. Keelway builds the score from FMCSA operating-authority status, insurance-on-file freshness, inspection-to-violation ratio, MC-DOT identity match, email-domain age, and behavioral heuristics that catch chameleon carriers — shell companies that re-register under a new MC number after an authority revocation.
How is this different from FMCSA's own carrier lookup?+
FMCSA's Safer lookup is a manual, one-carrier-at-a-time lookup that has no fraud-detection layer and no scoring. Keelway runs that lookup automatically on every inbound carrier email — typically 30–50 per posted load — and combines it with domain-age checks, historical lane-change signals, and MC-DOT identity analysis that FMCSA does not surface. The result is a single ranked score the coordinator can act on in seconds.
What chameleon-carrier signals does Keelway detect?+
Keelway checks for MC numbers registered within the past 90 days operating on lanes where authority-revoked carriers ran, MC-DOT name mismatches suggesting identity reuse, email domains registered days before a reply, sudden lane or equipment shifts inconsistent with a carrier's FMCSA history, and reply patterns that match known fraudulent email templates. See our deep-dive on the anatomy of a fraudulent carrier email for the full signal set.
Does Keelway integrate with Highway for carrier identity?+
Not today. Keelway runs alongside Highway, it does not read from it — there is no live Highway feed into the trust score. The key-exchange seam is built and waiting on a broker key, so a direct integration is on the roadmap. What Keelway scores on right now is FMCSA data, inbox-level signals, and your own carrier history. If you already pay for Highway, keep it: Highway answers identity at onboarding, Keelway ranks the reply on a specific load. Neither replaces the other.
What trust score threshold should I use to auto-decline?+
Keelway recommends starting with a soft flag at scores below 40 and a hard block below 20. These thresholds calibrate over time as Keelway learns the shape of your brokerage's inbound book — carriers you regularly book that score slightly lower on global signals get a per-brokerage credibility boost. We do not publish a cross-customer false-positive rate — there is no install base behind a number like that, and anyone quoting you one should be asked where it came from. Expect the first two to four weeks to be the tuning window.
How does Keelway handle insurance lapses mid-load?+
Keelway re-checks carrier insurance status at the time of acceptance and again at pickup. If insurance lapses between reply and dispatch, the load's coordinator gets a push alert before the truck is released. This does not replace your internal certificate-of-insurance workflow, but it does catch the carriers who reply with valid coverage and let it lapse between reply and load date — a pattern that is more common than most brokers expect.
Can I see why a carrier scored low?+
Yes. Every trust score in the ranked carrier list is expandable to the top three contributing signals — for example: 'MC registered 22 days ago,' 'Domain registered 11 days before this reply,' 'Insurance expiration within 14 days.' Coordinators can override a flag with one click and a note, which feeds the calibration model.
Is this only for TL carriers?+
No. Keelway scores inbound carrier emails for dry van, reefer, flatbed, step-deck, RGN, drayage, and partial-load operators. FMCSA operating-authority codes vary by equipment type and Keelway's parser accounts for the difference when building the score. LTL carrier-partner vetting is on the roadmap for Q3 2026.
What happens to a flagged carrier's email?+
Flagged emails are not deleted. They move to a separate triage queue visible to the coordinator and any team admin. The coordinator can review, override the flag, and proceed — or decline and log the reason. Every flag and every override is stored in the carrier's permanent record in Keelway, so your team builds an auditable history of high-risk carriers over time.
Every reply scored · No manual FMCSA lookups

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Related

Carrier Rate Extraction →

How Keelway pulls structured rate, equipment, and lane data from any of the 12 carrier email formats.

AI Load Covering →

Composite ranking by trust, rate, lane fit, and response speed — five ranked rows, one keystroke to cover.

What Is a Chameleon Carrier? →

The re-registration fraud pattern most brokers encounter before they know what to call it.

Anatomy of a Fraudulent Carrier Email →

A signal-by-signal breakdown of what a bad actor email looks like versus a legitimate carrier reply.