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.
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 $1 per load, 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.
FMCSA operating authority
Insurance on file — freshness and coverage
Inspection and violation history
MC-DOT identity and domain signals
Chameleon-carrier behavioral heuristics
Per-brokerage calibration
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.
Highway.com integration
For brokerages that already use Highway for carrier onboarding, Keelway's Growth and Enterprise plans connect directly to your Highway integration. Highway's verified-carrier network and onboarding risk flags fold into the Keelway trust score as a higher-tier signal layer — giving you the depth of Highway's know-your-carrier database combined with Keelway's per-load, real-time ranking. Neither product replaces the other; the combination materially improves score precision on new carriers that have not yet been onboarded through Highway.
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?+
Yes. Highway is our higher-tier carrier-identity signal source. Brokerages on Keelway's Growth and Enterprise plans can connect their Highway integration so that Highway's onboarding risk flags and verified-carrier network flow directly into the trust score composite. Highway's data is layered on top of Keelway's own FMCSA + behavioral signals — the score improves, it doesn't replace.
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. Most brokerages stabilize their false-positive rate under 2% within 30 days.
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.
Stop booking carriers you haven't actually vetted.
Book a trust score demoRelated
How Keelway pulls structured rate, equipment, and lane data from any of the 12 carrier email formats.
Composite ranking by trust, rate, lane fit, and response speed — five ranked rows, one keystroke to cover.
The re-registration fraud pattern most brokers encounter before they know what to call it.
A signal-by-signal breakdown of what a bad actor email looks like versus a legitimate carrier reply.