Cassandra Gaines, CEO of the carrier vetting service Carrier Assure, last week acknowledged the limitations of her platform in assessing sprinter van fleets, drayage fleets, or just about any company aside from full-truckload OTR haulers.
This came after reporting on a handful of sprinter van fleets saying Carrier Assure had all but ruined their business prospects by stamping them with an F grade, seemingly for little more than a dearth of roadside inspections on their records, and that Gaines and Carrier Assure had ignored their concerns.
“Carrier Assure is intended to score and predict how an over-the-road carrier is going to perform. Those full truckload carriers that cross state lines and go far,” she said in a YouTube video posted to Carrier Assure’s channel on Tuesday, July 9. “This is because these shipments are the most risky in the industry. Whenever you hear about double brokering or hostage loads or anything like that, it usually is involving full truckload over-the-road shipments.”
She specified that “other carriers that specialize in things such as final mile, expedite, drayage or ocean” might have a score on Carrier Assure, but that “score is again intended for over-the-road shipments, long haul shipments.”
Gaines added that “this is because often the FMCSA won’t tell any of the providers [of carrier vetting software] what different modes a carrier has.”
Gaines promised to provide “specialized scores” in the future that reflect the platform’s limitations, and also to continue providing “education” opportunities.
[Related: Carriers cry foul over Carrier Assure’s grading system]
The announcement came as a surprise to several Carrier Assure customers who spoke to Overdrive.
“This is the first I have seen the video or known about it,” Shine Logistics Group CEO Nick Madahar said three days after the announcement. “Never before has she came with this kind of disclaimer.”
Jim Land, owner of ZipLine Express, said he had a profitable business hauling for BNSF until J.B. Hunt bought it. Now, Land says Carrier Assure’s “F” grade on his under-10,000-lb. fleet keeps him locked out of previously profitable freight.Zipline Express
Even if the freight starts flowing again, carriers, brokers, compliance experts and even Carrier Assure customers all took issue with the brand’s algorithmic approach to assessing “carrier performance,” creating problems for trucking companies and then charging for solutions. Both carriers and customers raised alarm about Carrier Assure’s comms and operations, which they found opaque and prone to social media spats.
Carrier Assure sells carriers on ways to ‘shine’
On the same day Gaines released the YouTube announcement, she also posted on LinkedIn, where she has many more followers and strong engagement, offering carriers “an easy way to improve” their scores on her platform.
First, carriers “receive free use of the platform to review all the information,” she wrote, though other carriers disputed that and said they have to pay. Overdrive asked Gaines about the discrepancy, but got no response.
Second, carriers “can hire Adam Wingfield’s company, Innovative Logistics” Group, Gaines added, “to conduct an additional analysis of their company.” She noted that Carrier Assure does not get a cut of any money paid to Wingfield’s Innovative Logistics.
A frequent guest on Gaines’ podcast, Wingfield offers DOT compliance services for a $199 one-time fee focused on “ensuring the driver carries certain documents in the truck with them, completes the right inspections and physicals, records hours of service, marks DOT numbers on the trucks and a lot more.”
Carrier Assure customers said paying for the service can boost a carrier’s score by 15-20 points, though it’s unclear if only this particular service produces the benefit.
John Northington, owner of Escargo Express LLC, one of the cargo van carriers locked out of freight by a Carrier Assure F rating, dinging them for a dearth of roadside inspections, took issue with Gaines’ recommendation.
“Why should we have to pay someone for advice on authority that has been unfairly judged by an algorithm that is faulty and clearly does not have data points for TSA certifications?” he asked, referencing that his fleet is TSA-certified to enter airports, meaning they’ve met a high bar of identity verification already. “Why should we have to pay for a solution to a problem that someone else has created through faulty criteria?” he added, disputing that Carrier Assure scores could be improved via free membership.
Gaines responded with advice on how Northington might make his fleet shine, as she put it. “If you want brokers and shippers to give you freight, finding a way to make your business shine and stand out is advantageous.”
That carriers might have to spend a little money to put processes in place to improve her company’s ratings simply represents the cost of doing business, she argued. “Some businesses pay for marketing, PR, D&B, websites, etc., to shine. Your company doesn’t have an inspection, so you should find a way to stand out or get an inspection.”
Many commercial cargo-van operations never cross the 10,000-lb. GVW threshold in many states’ commercial vehicle definition. Not all states require such commercial cargo vans to cross scales. Furthermore, the presence or absence of an inspection doesn’t always mean a legitimate or illegitimate carrier.
[Related: FMCSA, police investigate double broker’s odd inspections history]
“So to shine, you can engage Adam’s business to provide you with a seal of approval and get that business,” Gaines continued in her LinkedIn commentary. “Yes, you have to pay for Adam’s company to give you a seal of approval. That’s the world of business.”
Northington said he’s not interested in paying to shine in Gaines’ eyes, and that his years of hauling should speak for itself. Gaines replied that as far as she knew, “our customers don’t use the score for expedite shipments,” and that Northington’s comment had been “nasty.”
Overdrive reporting last week revealed that at least some Carrier Assure customers do in fact use the scores to vet expedited carriers like Northington’s.
After the exchange, Northington’s comments disappeared from the posts and, he said, Gaines blocked him on LinkedIn. After not responding to questions from Overdrive about an interview proposed for Monday last week, Gaines also blocked this writer on LinkedIn.
It was that action that prompted Madahar, the fleet and brokerage owner, to speak out about his experience with Carrier Assure. “That’s really what spooked me,” Madahar said. “These companies like Carrier Assure have a power over carriers.”
He joined some early beta testers of Carrier Assure, current customers and other associates in suggesting a history of the service ignoring industry concerns with the grading system and other shortcomings.
Madahar showed documentation of a data breach that saw his business email address leaked on the dark web. That breach, according to his monitoring service, traced back to Carrier Assure. Madahar has known Gaines for years and thinks highly of her, but when he reached out about the breach, the company questioned the validity of his claim and never responded to his concerns.
After Madahar reached out in April, Carrier Assure responded that the data breach alert email from his monitoring service might have been a scam, and then left him hanging. “I never heard anything back, and in May I texted her again hoping either they will give me a response that something did or didn’t happen, but I got nothing,” Madahar said.
Like Northington, Madahar agreed that the grading system creates a problem for carriers by presenting interpretation of incomplete and often unverified publicly available data, then only offering paid avenues for carriers to review the record, contrary to the LinkedIn post from Carrier Assure referenced above.
“That’s the bar they’re stooping to in order to make money,” Madahar said. As noted above, Carrier Assure did not respond to Overdrive inquiries about this story.
There’s more to carrier vetting than just tech
Jason Rabine, founder of Max Freightlines, said Carrier Assure had reached out to him two years ago to test out the product before its official launch. As a mid-size broker, he “relies on vetting tools religiously” to protect himself from fraud, but he “couldn’t think of a worse vetting platform” than Carrier Assure.
The heart of the issue, according to Rabine and others who discussed Carrier Assure, lies with the algorithmic approach. Algorithms excel at quickly sorting heaps of data into neat buckets, but in software development there’s an old saying: Garbage in, garbage out.
If the publicly available DOT data that Carrier Assure repackages for fleets and brokers has errors and omissions — and as most any carrier will tell you, it does — conclusions the system can produce will never go beyond flawed assumptions, Rabine posited. He added he quickly saw flaws in how the system parses data and reaches conclusions and raised them with the company, but got no response, “not even a canned” or vague response.
“The more I looked at the product, the more I realized just how dangerous it is, based on harming companies with predictive scoring that’s out of touch with reality,” said Rabine. To deal with rampant fraud in brokered freight markets today, Rabine relies on vetting tools in carrier selection but also considerable manual work, including voice calls quizzing drivers about the particulars of a load, before he hands out a pickup number.
“If I post a load right now out of Los Angeles I’ll get 100 emails, and 95 will be scammers,” he estimated. Some of those scammers successfully game the system, earning inspections and even solid ratings on Carrier Assure, he added. Meanwhile, “of my top 25 carriers I’ve been running with for a decade, about half of them have an ‘F’ rating on Carrier Assure.”
Carrier Assure has enjoyed plenty success as a two-year old company. Insiders pegged the company’s clients as up to 10,000 users, all likely paying $149/month. Carrier Assure’s LinkedIn profile lists them as having between two and 10 employees.
Carrier Assure’s own customer testimonials praise the brand’s ability to reduce a carrier’s rating to a single grade, but even the text of Carrier Assure’s F grade warning makes it clear that it’s by no means definitive.
This is what the “F” grade warning in Carrier Assure’s grading system says.
Why not simply let cargo fleet vans like Northington’s opt out of ratings? Rabine suggested that would require serious labor in manual vetting efforts, and that all the necessary nuance sort of defeats the purpose of a letter grade. Rabine speculated the company doesn’t have sufficient staff to be “capable of that,’ he said. “We live in a ‘swipe right’ society. But the minute you take your eye off the ball” vetting carriers, “that’s when you’re done for. … You can’t use a predictive scoring model and not expect people’s livelihood to be ruined.”
Most Carrier Assure customers we spoke to said the service represents just one of a few carrier vetting tools they use, and that they still spend time manually vetting carriers.
Joseph Metin, a former FMCSA safety investigator tasked with ensuring motor carrier data accuracy, said Carrier Assure represented just one of dozens of “carrier compliance” tech startups capitalizing on the freight fraud boom. Metin concurred with Rabine’s assessment, and also said he’d reached out to Gaines with his concerns about the platform. “I was a former FMCSA Investigator and I’ve reviewed the data for thousands of motor carriers,” said Metin. He added that he made Gaines abundantly aware that “it’s highly likely and entirely possible that a motor carrier can go one year, two years, even five years without a DOT Inspection.”
[Related: ‘We’re hemorrhaging money’: Big brokers, shippers feel the heat from double brokers]
Metin went on to point out the issues with FMCSA’s data accuracy. If a carrier lists the owner as Mickey Mouse and the principal place of business as 123 Sesame Street, Carrier Assure’s tech would only pull that data and not take steps to verify it, as some competitor services do.
Metin pointed to backlogs in the federal New Entrant audit program, noting that some states are behind by years, depriving legitimate new carriers there of a potentially valuable record of data in the system. Another example: the DataQs program and state-by-state variations in approach to it. Some states are receptive to overturning violations, Metin said, while others push back.
“You can’t do it with software,” Metin concluded of carrier vetting. “You need to have some sort of interaction.”
Among all the criticisms, one early beta tester of Carrier Assure stood by the product, pointing to the specific language Carrier Assure uses on F rated carriers shown in the image above.
“We recommend that you further analyze this carrier prior to tendering any shipments with sensitive cargo, complexity, or shipments involving food,” the window on F-rated carriers reads. Instead, Carrier Assure recommends using the carrier for low-value, “flexible” and “easy” loads.
“People don’t understand how to use it,” the tester said. “They want to delegate all decisions and responsibility for those decisions to the software.”
The F rating should be understood as a “flag to ‘stop, think and ask'” questions of the carrier rather than a death sentence for the carrier, the tester said.
As of Monday, none of the expedited carriers said that Carrier Assure’s announcement had made any difference. Brokers that use Carrier Assure to vet sprinter van fleets still won’t tender them loads, they said.
“Actions speak louder than words,” said Jim Land, owner of ZipLine Express, one of the cargo van fleets locked out of previous business relationships by Carrier Assure’s ratings. “As of right now, we have been shut off of Carrier Assure.” He added he “can’t even go and look in there. My account has been closed down.”
[Related: The third parties following you around the freight networks: Brokers’ ‘data driven’ decision-making]