The AWA Identity Theft Protector Tool is intended to help the entire transportation industry protect itself from the identity thieves which currently plague our industry. This tool provides brokers and carriers the most updated contact information provided to the FMCSA by a broker or carrier. We encourage both brokers and carriers to check the below information prior to agreeing to do business with a new entity they have not worked with in the past.

• Check the email address first.  The email address a company has provided to the FMCSA is the most crucial thing to verify.  If a company has provided a gmail.com email address or an email with unique domain like awcollects.com, it’s important to ensure the email address you are communicating with either matches what the company provided or has the same unique domain.  Most major carriers or brokers have their own unique email domain.  Of the identity theft cases AWA has worked on in the past the email address is always different than the one the company originally provided to the FMCSA.

• Check the phone number.  If the phone number the person calls in on doesn’t match the one provided to the FMCSA be sure to double check their email to ensure it at least matches.

• To be on the safe side, if either the email or phone number doesn’t match it would be a good idea to simply call the number provided in the AWA Identity Theft Protector Tool.  Making sure the person you are working with actually works for that company  is worth the time, remember an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!