The Identity Toll: How the American Carrier Is Being Dismantled Piece by Piece — and Who's Profiting From Every Piece

An investigative report by Michael Thomas — Founder, Logistical Forwarding Solutions & Freight University

It took my company almost an hour to get verified for one load.

One load. Not a contract. Not a lane. One spot-market load that wasn't even paying well. And before we could touch it, my driver had to upload his driver's license, take live photographs of his own face, and consent to that biometric data — the same legal category as a fingerprint — being stored by a company he'd never heard of for up to three years.

He told me it made him uncomfortable. He did it anyway. He had no choice.

Then the load canceled.

That 1hour we wasted is a reflection of the American trucking industry in 2026, compressed into a single transaction: the carrier surrenders everything, receives nothing guaranteed, and every other party in the chain gets paid.

I've spent nearly thirty years in this industry — dispatching, brokering, building trucking companies, and now teaching thousands of drivers and owner-operators for free at Freight University. I've written before that the American trucking company is dying. Today I want to show you how it's dying. Because it's not dying all at once.

It's dying piece by piece. And every piece is being sold.

Part One: The Gate

Let's tart with what nobody disputes. A company called Highway has become one of the dominant gatekeepers of American freight. By its own published numbers, it serves more than a thousand brokerages — including 70 of the 100 largest brokers in the country. It is venture-backed, funded by growth-equity firms, and built by the former CEO of the largest payments network in brokered freight.

In September 2025, Highway rolled out mandatory identity verification for carriers. To keep an active account, a carrier must now upload a government-issued photo ID and submit live facial images that are matched against it. Also some carriers have reported being asked for Vehicle titles, loan information on equipment. Carriers must consent to biometric storage for up to three years. Overdrive magazine documented what happens to those who refuse: Highway told one owner-operator directly that without completing verification, he could not maintain an active account.

Legitimate carriers — years of clean authority, real trucks, real insurance — were locked out of freight by brokers they'd hauled for before, because they drew a line at handing over their license and their face.

Understand the structure here, because it's the whole story:

The broker pays Highway's subscription. The carrier pays with his identity. The carrier is not Highway's customer. The carrier is the inventory — the thing being verified, catalogued, and served up to the paying customer.

And it doesn't stop at the license and the face. Depending on broker settings, carriers have been asked for cab cards, insurance certificates, VINs — and in some cases, truck titles and loan agreements. Think about that. A financial document showing what you owe on your truck, demanded as a condition of hauling a load.

What does a loan agreement have to do with verifying identity?

Nobody has explained it. But somebody is collecting it.

Part Two: The Numbers That Convict the System

Now here is where the story turns from uncomfortable to shocking. Because if this surrender of identity were working — if it were actually protecting the industry — you could at least argue the trade was worth it.

It is not working. The numbers are public, and they are damning.

In 2025 — the very period this verification regime became nearly universal across American brokerage — cargo theft losses reached nearly $725 million, a 60 percent increase over the prior year, according to Verisk CargoNet's independent analysis. Confirmed theft incidents rose 18 percent. Fraudulent email attempts more than doubled — up 117 percent, approaching two million attempts.

But the most devastating statistic comes from Highway itself. Its own Q4 2025 Freight Fraud Index, reported by Overdrive, found that nearly half of all stolen loads by the end of 2025 involved criminals using legitimate carrier identities — real, verified authority, real equipment access, or insider help.

Sit with that. The industry built a gate. It forced every honest carrier in America to strip down at that gate — license, face, biometrics, equipment, financials.

And by the gate-builder's own count, nearly half the theft is now being committed by people who pass through the gate wearing verified identities.

So the honest question — the one this entire industry should be demanding an answer to — is this: where are criminals getting legitimate carrier identities from?

Every fraudster operating under a real carrier's name needed that carrier's information to do it. Somewhere, the identity of an honest American trucking company is leaking into criminal hands — at industrial scale, because this is a nine-figure crime wave.

I'm not accusing any single company of being the leak. I'm stating the arithmetic: the more places a carrier's complete identity is stored, copied, transmitted, and handled — by vendors, sub-vendors, and support teams around the world — the more doors exist. And we just built the biggest identity warehouse in the history of trucking.

I know what identity theft feels like from the inside. My own company, Logistical Forwarding Solutions, has been impersonated by overseas fraudsters using our name against the very people who trust us. The people committing this fraud are professionals. And professionals go where the data is.

Part Three: Where Does the Data Actually Go?

Here's what's on the record, from Highway's own statements and published policies:

Highway has confirmed it employs team members "all over the world," including a dedicated overnight support team based in the Philippines. The biometric verification itself is not performed by Highway at all — it's processed by a third-party Silicon Valley vendor called Persona.

Highway's own privacy policy discloses that personal information may be processed outside North America and, when it is, may be subject to foreign laws with different standards of protection — including foreign government access. The same policy discloses sharing data with vendors for "identity validation," "customer service," and "data enrichment," sharing identifiers with advertising partners, and the right to hand data to corporate affiliates or transfer it in a corporate transaction — meaning if the company is ever sold, the identity vault goes with it. If you need more proof, you can read their policy here : https://highway.com/privacy-policy

And in February 2026, part of Persona's own government-product codebase was discovered sitting exposed on a public server. Persona says no customer data was in it. Take them at their word. But that is the vendor infrastructure holding the faces of American truck drivers — and it just demonstrated, publicly, that mistakes happen.

Who Is Persona? The $2 Billion Machine Behind the Curtain

When a truck driver scans his face to get verified, Highway isn't even the company processing it. The biometric work is handed off to a third party most drivers have never heard of: Persona Identities, Inc., a San Francisco identity company valued at $2 billion, backed by $417 million in venture capital — including rounds led by Founders Fund, the venture firm of Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel.

Persona is not a small vendor. It runs identity checks for OpenAI's ChatGPT, Discord, LinkedIn, Roblox, DoorDash, and Walmart's Spark driver app. The same machine scanning the face of an American trucker at a truck stop is scanning hundreds of millions of faces across the internet. And in the last year, that machine has been at the center of one controversy after another.

In February 2026, security researchers discovered that Persona had left 53 megabytes of its own source code — nearly 2,500 files — sitting publicly accessible on the internet. No hacking required.

What the researchers found inside should concern every driver who has ever been told "your data is safe." The code revealed a platform capable of running 269 distinct verification checks — far beyond confirming a name matches a license. Facial recognition against watchlists. Screening against lists of politically exposed persons.

"Adverse media" checks across 14 categories, including terrorism and espionage. Risk scores assigned to human beings. Retention of faces, government ID numbers, device fingerprints, and IP addresses for up to three years — 1,095 days, written right into the code — even where partner companies had told their users the limit was one year.

Researchers also alleged, based on matching code signatures, that the same codebase powered a government-facing platform capable of filing reports to federal financial-crime authorities. Persona's CEO denied any federal customers and said the exposed system held no customer data. Discord ended its relationship with Persona within a month anyway.

Persona is also already being sued by drivers. Under Illinois' biometric privacy law, DoorDash delivery drivers — people who, just like truckers, had to submit selfies and driver's license photos to work — filed a class action against Persona. Persona tried to force those drivers into individual arbitration; an Illinois appellate court ruled Persona had no legitimate basis to do so, and the case moved forward. Walmart settled similar biometric claims over its Spark driver app, which used Persona to verify drivers' faces. A February 2026 class action names Persona again, this time over facial scans collected from renters. Notice who keeps showing up in these lawsuits: drivers. Working people who had to scan their face to earn a living.

And here is the part that should keep this whole industry up at night. Persona's own privacy policy states that biometric data is processed through shared cloud infrastructure — Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, MongoDB — and Persona itself has acknowledged it does not offer single-tenant, dedicated storage. Your driver's face does not sit in its own vault. It sits in the same multi-tenant machine as everyone else's.

Persona advertises the ability to verify identities in more than 200 countries. Highway, for its part, has confirmed its own support operations include a dedicated team based in the Philippines, and Highway's privacy policy admits personal information may be processed outside North America — where, in its own words, it may be subject to foreign laws and foreign government access.

In this same ecosystem. Months before American truckers were told that uploading their license and their face was mandatory. The driver is told: it's secure, it's standard, it's for your protection. Meanwhile, the actual chain looks like this: his face and license leave his hands, pass through a broker's platform, get processed by a Silicon Valley vendor he never chose, on shared cloud servers, under retention terms buried in code, touchable by support operations overseas, inside a system that has already leaked its own blueprints onto the open internet and is already defending itself against drivers in court.

Nobody asked the trucker if he agreed to any of that. They just told him he couldn't haul the load until he did.

So the questions write themselves. When a driver in Ohio uploads his license and his face at a truck stop at 11 p.m., name every company that data touches. Every server location. Every country. Can an overseas support agent view an American driver's license image? Yes or no? Who audits it? Who is liable when — not if, when — a vault this valuable is breached?

Nobody has answered. The carriers keep uploading anyway. Because the load is on the other side of the gate.

Part Four: The Extraction Economy — Everyone Eats Off the Carrier

Now widen the lens, because Highway is not the disease. Highway is a symptom of something I've watched metastasize for thirty years.

Everything in this industry runs on the carrier, and everything in this industry now bills the carrier — in money, in data, or in both.

Let's walk through what a small trucking company

surrenders today just to exist:

His identity — license, face, biometrics — to the vetting platforms, stored for years, processed by vendors he never chose.

His location, every second of every day — through the federally mandated electronic logging device (ELD), a live GPS feed of where he is, how he drives, when he sleeps. Some onboarding processes ask carriers to hand over their ELD login credentials — the keys to their own telematics — to third parties.

His finances — to the factoring company that advances his invoice money, taking its percentage off the top of every single load, holding his receivables, sometimes trapping him in lockbox arrangements he can't escape. Factoring exists because slow payment starves carriers — and then the cure charges the patient.

His margins — to the broker's spread. I've been on both sides of this table. In my experience, the spread taken between what the shipper pays and what the carrier receives can run to 30 percent or more of the freight dollar. The carrier — the one buying the fuel, the tires, the insurance, taking the physical and financial risk — often can't see that spread at all.

His equipment data — to maintenance networks, insurance telematics programs, and lenders who price his premiums and payments off the very data streams he's compelled to share.

His attention and his subscription dollars — to the load boards that charge him monthly for the privilege of seeing freight, freight he then can't book until he clears the verification gate.

Each one of these, taken alone, has a justification. Fraud prevention. Safety. Cash flow. Market access. Taken together, they form something else entirely: an economy where the small carrier is not the customer of anything — he is the raw material of everything. His identity feeds the vetting industry. His location feeds the data industry. His invoices feed the factoring industry. His margins feed the brokerage industry. His premiums feed the insurance industry.

The carrier is the only party in American freight who pays into every layer and controls none of them.

And here is the bitter irony that should keep this industry awake at night: the small carrier is handing over 100 percent of his identity for the privilege of hauling freight at rates that are putting him out of business. He is financing — with his own data, his own margins, his own privacy — the very ecosystem that is consuming him. The 2023–2025 freight recession bankrupted small carriers by the thousands. The survivors weren't rewarded. They were handed a new gate and told to strip.

Part Five: Is This Entrapment? You Decide.

I want to be careful with this word, so let me define exactly what I mean.

I'm not making a legal claim. I'm describing a structure. Entrapment, in plain English, is when a system is built so that a person's only path forward requires them to surrender something they would never surrender freely — and then the system profits from the surrender.

Test the carrier's situation against that definition:

Did the carrier choose this? No. The broker chose the platform; the carrier was informed. Can the carrier refuse? Technically yes — and lose access to the brokers who control the freight. Owner-operators who refused have publicly reported losing thousands of dollars in loads. That is not a choice. That is a toll booth with no side road. If they dont join, they get no loads. Period!

Is the carrier compensated for what he surrenders? No. He pays nothing to be vetted — because he pays with something worth far more than a fee.

Does the surrender protect him? The theft numbers say no. Fraud has exploded around the gate, and half of it now walks through the gate wearing verified credentials.

Who profits? The platform collects broker subscriptions. The brokers collect liability cover — especially after the Supreme Court's 2026 decision stripped brokers of a key legal defense against negligent-hiring lawsuits, which made carrier vetting a legal shield brokers will now pay almost anything for. The vendors collect processing fees. The investors collect growth.

The carrier collects the risk.

A system where the essential worker must surrender his complete identity to entities that profit from him, in exchange for underpriced work, with no ability to refuse and no share of the value created from his own information — call it what you want. I call it a trap. And now that it's built, we can all finally see it.

Part Six: It Starts With the Carrier. It Has Always Started With the Carrier.

I teach circular thinking. Every dollar in this industry — every broker margin, every factoring fee, every insurance premium, every software subscription, every venture-capital return — begins with one thing: a driver turning a wheel. No carrier, no load. No load, no broker. No broker, no platform. No platform, no investor.

The circle starts with the carrier. And right now, the circle is being bled at its source and fed at every other point.

I am not against verification. Fraud is real — I fight it every day, and my own company's name has been weaponized by criminals. But a verification system worthy of this industry would answer to the people it verifies. It would keep American driver identity on American soil, handled by vetted American personnel, deleted on demand. It would compensate or at minimum protect the person whose identity makes the whole system function. It would publish its data map. It would carry liability when it fails. And it would be measured by one metric only: is the carrier safer, or EXSPOSED?

By that standard, what we have today fails on every count.

So here is my challenge — to Highway, to every vetting platform, to every broker mandating these systems, and to every executive profiting from the pieces of the American carrier:

Show us the map. Every country the data touches. Show us the access. Who can view a driver's license image, and from where. Show us the results. If verification works, explain the $725 million. Explain the verified identities stealing freight. And show us the exit. Give the carrier the right to be forgotten — actually deleted, on demand, verified.

Until those answers come, every driver uploading his face at a truck stop tonight deserves to know the truth: he isn't being protected. He's being processed. Carriers beware.

Michael Thomas is a nearly 30-year logistics veteran and the founder of Logistical Forwarding Solutions and Freight University, a free education platform serving thousands of drivers, dispatchers, and owner-operators. His operating doctrine is simple: if it hurts the trucking company, we don't do it.

Sources: Overdrive (Alex Lockie, September 2025 reporting on Highway identity verification); Verisk CargoNet 2025 cargo theft analysis (January 2026); Highway Q4 2025 Freight Fraud Index (via Overdrive); Highway privacy policy (updated January 2026); Fortune (February 2026, Persona codebase exposure); Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, U.S. Supreme Court (2026). Statements about broker spreads and impersonation fraud reflect the author's direct professional experience.