Your Insurer Is About to Ask a Question You're Not Ready For.

Section 01"The duty to carefully select and monitor subcontractors is now a real, enforceable obligation under freight liability insurance", BLD...

We'd like to start this article with BLD Legal department's statement, because it summarises better than anything what industry is going through now.

We've been watching cargo fraud numbers for a while. And there's a specific data point from the German Insurance Association (GDV) that we keep coming back to. Again and again. In the first seven months of 2025, German transport insurers recorded 88 phantom carrier cases. That's as many as the entire previous year. In seven months. And the average loss per case didn't stay flat either, it jumped from around €130,000 to nearly €200,000.

Let that sink in. This isn't a slow trend. This is acceleration. A serious one.

And here's the thing nobody in our industry is talking about loudly enough: the insurance response to this isn't just going to be higher premiums. It's going to be a verification requirement. It's already starting.

“The question is no longer “how did you get robbed?" It's "have you properly check?"”

Phantom carrier fraud isn’t a new thing. If we look at the case from 2024 from the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf carefully, we will see that a freight forwarder used a phantom carrier and as a result his cargo was gone. When the insurer reviewed the claim, they didn't just ask what happened. They asked what was verified before the keys were handed over. As a result, the insurer cut the payment by 30%. Not because the forwarder was criminal. Because the selection of the carrier was not completed properly.

And now, let’s look at its escalation:

In 2021, that number was EUR 55 million. That is a 438% increase in three years

Germany sits at the centre of this. In November 2025 alone,

“Germany reported 206 cargo crime incidents. Italy came second with 80. Spain registered 33, France 26, the Netherlands 23. Romania, for comparison, recorded 14.”

These numbers matter, because they tell you where the problem is concentrated today and, more importantly, where it is heading. And that’s where it becomes interesting.

The shift we see is crucial: from one side we see an increase in phantom carrier, and as a result of it , someone needs to step in and start changing one of the true sources for that: the selection and onboarding stages. This is the shift we are going to explore in this acricle. BLD's legal commentary on that case makes it explicit:

And it is just the beginning! Because when one insurer does it, others follow. When one large shipper or freight forwarder starts requiring documented verification from their carriers, the rest of the market follows. We've seen this pattern in fintech, food safety, in GDPR. A legal precedent plus a few large players setting the standard equals a new market requirement. The window between "best practice" and "mandatory" is closing fast.

Section 02The fraud itself has gotten smarter. Much smarter.

Let’s look at the reasons what is the real source for fraud to scale. The answer seems to be in the surface: with the raise of AI, it is becoming much easier to create non-existing identities which look real. On paper.

IUMI and TAPA EMEA put out a joint warning this year that we'd recommend everyone think about.

Billions in losses. And the methods? Shell companies, cloned legitimate firms, look-alike email domains, fake insurance certificates. Yes, fake insurance certificates. Criminals don't just fake transport documents anymore. They fake the proof of legitimacy that carriers use to build trust.

HDI Risk Consulting describes this precisely: forged licences, fake insurance policies, free-provider email addresses, prepaid mobile numbers, copied number plates. Everything a carrier uses to say "we're real”, counterfeited and handed to a loading dock team who has no way to check.

This is why simply receiving a PDF is no longer a verification. A PDF is a piece of paper. It proves nothing except that someone has a printer or scanner. The moment of theft isn't when the truck disappears. It's at the loading ramp.

Munich Re's 2025 cargo theft report makes this operational: the loading handover is the critical vulnerability. They recommend that for high-value cargo, biometric or secure driver identity verification becomes standard. Not "preferred." Standard.

HDI says the same thing differently:

“the loading site needs to know in advance who is coming: carrier name, driver name, trailer plate. On arrival, everything gets checked. Any discrepancy stops the load.”

Lars Lange, the Secretary General of IUMI, said publicly that

Most carriers reading this are thinking: that's a lot of process. We get it. We thought the same thing at first. But flip the perspective for a second. If a criminal clones your company name and picks up a load in your name, you want to be the carrier that has documented, timestamped evidence that your driver was never there. Your reputation is on the line. Your insurance relationship is on the line.

Section 03So what does this mean for the market right now?

We surveyed hundreds of carriers, insurers, industry leaders across Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain, Poland, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

“We asked one question:”

"Have you seen insurers beginning to refuse coverage for stolen truck cases where carrier and driver verification was not properly done?".

And the answers came back divided along a line that runs almost exactly through the middle of the continent.

In the west, companies said yes. Not uniformly, not in every case, but enough of them, and with enough specificity, to confirm that the shift is real. Freight forwarders in Germany described conversations with their brokers that felt different to previous years. Operators in the Netherlands and France talked about partial refusals.

In the east, roughly nine out of ten respondents said they had not seen this at all. Their insurers had not raised it. Their brokers had not raised it. From their daily operating reality, the issue did not exist.

That gap is the most important thing we found.

“Not because it means Eastern European operators are safer. They are not. It means they are operating in a window of time before the consequences of inadequate verification have caught up with the operational risk.”

That window is real. It exists because cargo insurance penetration is lower in much of Eastern Europe, because fewer claims reach formal dispute, and because the legal environment is less litigious than Germany's.

The same phantom carrier networks that are dismantling loads in Frankfurt are active across the entire EU. The same underwriting scrutiny that is reshaping German transport liability insurance will reach Polish and Romanian contracts. The criminals follow the freight.

Section 04Insurers and brokers will increasingly ask for verification documentation before and during claims, not just after. And it will happen much faster than we think.

• Forwarders under pressure on their own liability will preference carriers that make their compliance easy to document and easy to onboard.
• Larger shippers will start adding verification requirements to carrier onboarding, the same way they added ISO certifications or GDP qualifications in other sectors.
• Carriers without a structured answer to "how do you verify your drivers and your identity?" will feel that in tender decisions before they fully understand why.

This is exactly the gap we built Trusted Carrier to close.

“We're not adding another document process. We're replacing the process entirely.”

A carrier signs up once, verifies their company identity and their drivers, and from that point forward, every forwarder, shipper or insurance assessor who asks "are you really who you say you are?" gets a structured, auditable answer. In under five minutes.

And in a market this competitive, that has direct revenue and compliance consequences. The window to move first is real. It's not closing tomorrow. But it is closing.

The question isn't whether your insurers and customers will ask you for this. They will. The question is whether you're already the answer when they do.