A load you do not get paid for costs more than an empty day. You have burned the fuel, the hours, the maintenance and the capacity you could have sold to someone else — and then you spend weeks chasing an invoice.
The checks below take about four minutes on a broker you have not worked with. Do them in this order, because each one is cheaper than the one after it.
1. Does the authority exist, and how old is it?
Look the broker up in the FMCSA's licensing and insurance records by MC number. You are checking two things: that the authority is active, and how long it has existed.
A brand-new authority is not automatically a problem — everyone starts somewhere. But a new authority combined with an unusually good rate is the single most common shape of a load that does not pay, because the cheapest way to run a fraud is to stand up an entity, book freight aggressively, and disappear before the invoices come due.
2. Is the surety bond in place?
Brokers are required to carry a surety bond. Check that it is active and that no claims have been filed against it.
Claims against a bond are a public signal that other carriers have already not been paid. One claim can be a dispute. A pattern is a decision.
3. What do other carriers say about days-to-pay?
Credit reporting and carrier-review services exist for exactly this. What matters is not the star rating but the days-to-pay figure and its consistency.
A broker who reliably pays in forty days is easier to run a business against than one who usually pays in twenty and sometimes in ninety. Predictability is worth real money to a small fleet, because it is what lets you plan fuel and payroll without a factoring facility eating your margin.
4. Does the paperwork match the phone call?
This is where double-brokering and identity theft show up. Check that these agree:
- The company name on the rate confirmation matches the name on the authority
- The MC number on the rate con matches the one you looked up
- The email domain matches the company's real domain, not a lookalike or a free mailbox
- The phone number on the rate con matches the one in the public record, not just the one that called you
- Payment remittance details have not 'recently changed'
5. Does the rate make sense?
A rate well above the lane's normal range, offered to a carrier the broker has never used, on a load that must move immediately, is not good fortune. Urgency plus generosity plus an unfamiliar counterparty is the combination worth slowing down for.
This is the one check that costs nothing and catches the most, because fraud has to be attractive to work.
Make it a habit, not a judgement call
The reason carriers skip these checks is not ignorance. It is that the checks feel least necessary exactly when the pressure to book is highest — an empty truck, a Friday afternoon, a rate that solves the week.
Which is why it works better as a fixed routine than a case-by-case decision. Same five checks, every new broker, before the truck moves.