Resources
Straight answers about the paperwork, the rules, and the handoff — written for the person on the lot, not for a search engine.
What changed when the rule became fully effective on January 16, 2026, why the required security is still $75,000, and the seven-business-day window that can end a broker’s authority.
How the scheme works, the two ways it costs you money, the warning signs visible at pickup, and what to do if you suspect it.
Reading the certificate is the easy part. Confirming the policy against the insurer’s own filing is the part that matters.
Where to look it up, what “active” actually means, and what a revoked authority looks like before a truck shows up.
Building a two-party condition record that holds up, instead of one side’s photos against the other’s.
What belongs on the document, who signs it, and why it is the first thing asked for in a damage dispute.
Check the carrier's USDOT or MC operating authority against FMCSA's own record rather than a PDF they email you, because an authority can be revoked after the paperwork was issued. Then confirm insurance at the source: read the certificate, then cross-check the policy against the insurer's own filing, because a certificate can be doctored and a policy number swapped in. Sweeper runs both checks and records the result as evidence — no check can guarantee that a carrier is legitimate in any given case.
Double brokering is when the carrier you dispatched a load to quietly re-brokers it to someone else, so the driver who actually shows up is not the driver on your dispatch. Because the vehicle changes hands outside your paperwork, recovery and insurance claims get complicated when something goes wrong. Comparing the driver's identity at the curb against the dispatch record is where that mismatch can surface — at pickup, rather than after the vehicle is gone.
Scan every VIN and decode it against the federal NHTSA database so the vehicles on the truck match the ones on the load, then capture timestamped condition photos before the wheels turn. When both sides photograph the same vehicle at the same handoff, the result is a two-party condition baseline instead of one party's word against the other's. Repeating the capture at delivery means a damage dispute is argued from a dated record rather than from whichever photos turn up later.
A chain of custody is the documented record of who held a vehicle, where, and when, from the pickup handoff through delivery. In Sweeper each step is recorded as its own entry: carrier authority, insurance, driver identity, credential release inside the pickup geofence, VIN match with condition photos, and a signed receipt at the destination. The signature is bound to the verified identity and captured inside the destination geofence, which makes the record timestamped and tamper-evident.