What do brokers check before booking a carrier?

Authority status, insurance, safety data, authority age, and — increasingly — identity signals: does your email, phone, and web presence match your FMCSA record, or do you look like a double-brokering front?

When a broker considers your truck for a load, a vetting sequence runs before the rate confirmation goes out — automated at the big brokerages, manual at small ones, but checking the same things. Operating authority: active, correct type, and old enough (many brokers gate at 90 days to 6 months because fraud runs on fresh authorities). Insurance: active policy meeting their minimums — typically $1M auto liability and $100K cargo — verified through monitoring services, not your PDF. Safety: CSA BASICs against their thresholds, out-of-service rates, crash history, and your safety rating if you have one. Then the layer that's grown the most since double-brokering exploded: identity verification. Vetting platforms now cross-check whether the contact info on the load matches the carrier's FMCSA record, whether the email domain is connected to the company or a freshly registered lookalike, whether the phone is VOIP, and whether the carrier has any verifiable public footprint at all. This is where legitimate small carriers get burned by invisibility: a real company with no web presence, a personal gmail on its FMCSA record, and a phone that doesn't match anything looks — to an algorithm — exactly like a fraud shell. The fixes are unglamorous and effective: keep your MCS-150 current, use one consistent email and phone everywhere, and maintain a public page that ties your DOT number, company name, and contact together so verification finds confirmation instead of holes.