The Pitfalls of Intermediaries in Transport.

The road freight transport industry is unfortunately rife with unfair practices by intermediaries. Below we present the most common forwarding pathologies encountered on cargo exchanges, which we have gathered after months of experience working on transport exchanges and cooperating with forwarders, as well as from conversations with other carriers. Each example is a brief description of a situation that both clients using transport services and carriers executing orders should be wary of.

• Extreme margin at the carrier’s expense: It happens that a client pays, for example, 700 EUR for transport, and the forwarder offers to have the transport done by a carrier for only 200 EUR, keeping the rest as a high commission. Such an intermediary looks for the cheapest carrier, often of low quality, to maximize their profit. In practice, this means “fleecing” the subcontractor, e.g., the client pays a rate of 1.5 EUR/km, while the carrier only gets 0.85 EUR/km. An excessive margin usually affects the quality of the service—when ordering transport for a suspiciously low price, you can expect problems with timeliness or safety.
• Selling freight as FTL with a hidden additional load: A forwarder declares a full truckload (FTL) transport to the client—meaning for their exclusive use—and then, without the client’s knowledge, adds an additional load from another client to the vehicle. To hide this fact from the client, the forwarder instructs the carrier to have an empty cargo space at loading and orders the additional load only after picking up the goods. As a result, the client pays for the entire truck, and their goods travel with an additional load. This allows the forwarder to double their revenue from a single trip, but it is often hidden from the client. The consequences can be extended delivery times or limited space/load capacity, which violates the terms of the agreement and the client’s trust.
• Proposals to overload vehicles: Some intermediaries persuade carriers to break weight regulations to save on the number of trips. An example is ordering a van up to 3.5 tons to carry two loads of 600 kg each at the same time, which risks overloading the vehicle. Unfortunately, such practices are quite common in the market—it is estimated that almost every second truck on the road is overloaded, and many companies knowingly break the rules. Forwarders openly seek transport for overloaded cargo, and compliant carriers agree to it.
• Understating the declared weight of the cargo: A common dishonesty is deliberately stating a lower weight of the goods in the documents than the actual weight. The order from the forwarder shows a weight of 200 kg, although the cargo actually weighs 600 kg—which only becomes apparent at loading when the driver notices that the rear suspension has sagged excessively. The forwarder may try to find a cheaper carrier this way (because the price can depend on the weight) or avoid providing a larger vehicle. Falsifying such data is very risky and illegal—people in the industry point out that there are clients who understate the weight of goods and forwarders who falsify consignment notes so that “on paper everything adds up.”
• Ignoring the lack of ratings and carrier verification: An honest forwarder should check the carrier (their licenses, OCP policy, reputation, ratings from previous orders, etc.) before commissioning a transport. However, there are companies that, just to get it cheaper, commission loads to carriers with no history or verification on the exchange. At the beginning of our activity, we took orders from transport exchanges and, without any ratings, as a new carrier, we received orders to carry out transport on our very first day on the exchange. Ignoring a complete lack of ratings or signals of a carrier’s unreliability is a sign of gross negligence. This practice is asking for trouble—a company without references may turn out to be unreliable, insolvent, and in extreme cases, the cargo may even be stolen by a fraudulent “ghost carrier.” The forwarder’s lack of caution in choosing a subcontractor then hits the client, who does not receive the proper quality of service or suffers losses.
• Extending payment terms by requiring original documents: A common trick is a clause in the order stating that the payment term for the freight is counted from the delivery of the complete transport documentation in the original. The forwarder does not accept scans by email—the carrier must send the papers by post or courier, which means several extra days (and sometimes weeks) of delay before the payment period even begins. In practice, the carrier waits for payment much longer than would appear from the contract at first glance. Importantly, making payment for transport dependent on the submission of documents is considered an abuse—the law requires payment for the service performed, and the documents are only confirmation of it. Court rulings indicate that extending the payment term (e.g., to 90 days) due to delayed documents is an illegal practice. Nevertheless, many forwarders still use such provisions to postpone payment to the carrier.
• Unusual and burdensome payment schemes: Besides simply extending the terms, some companies impose unusual payment rules that make life difficult for carriers. For example, you may find information that transfers are only made on Fridays—if the invoice or documents arrive after this deadline, the payment is postponed to the next cycle. Other ideas include calculating the payment term not from the date the service was performed, but from the end of the month (which actually adds up to several days). Sometimes both methods are combined: e.g., 45 days from the end of the month + payment only on specific days. Such provisions, although not always contrary to the law, are deliberately complicated—their effect is an additional delay in payment and difficulty for the carrier in tracking when the payment should arrive. Honest clients do not need such excuses—non-transparent payment terms are a warning sign.
• Contractual penalties inconsistent with the law: Many forwarding orders contain clauses about contractual penalties imposed on the carrier for various shortcomings. The problem is that the amount of these penalties is often grossly excessive or contrary to applicable regulations. For example, one finds clauses like “200 EUR penalty for not providing the original documents on time” or “50 EUR for each day of delivery delay.” Such provisions are meant to intimidate the carrier, but in the eyes of the law, they are often invalid. The CMR Convention (for international transport) limits liability for delay—compensation cannot exceed the freight charge, and flat-rate penalties for each day violate these provisions. Polish transport law also does not provide for arbitrary penalties for everything—a penalty must be proportional to the damage and justified. The abuse of contractual penalties is a pathology: instead of protecting interests, they become a way to deduct part of the freight at the carrier’s expense. In practice, many of these penalties cannot be legally enforced anyway, but their mere presence in the contract testifies to the client’s dishonest approach.
• CMR neutralization (falsifying the consignment note): This is a procedure in which the forwarder hides the true parties of the transport by interfering with the CMR consignment note. For example, they require the carrier to issue two versions of the document: one with the correct sender/receiver data (for inspection), and another “neutralized” one—with the company name replaced by the forwarder’s, which is shown to the client. The purpose of neutralization is to hide the identity of the actual carrier from the loader or consignee to prevent them from establishing direct cooperation. Although part of the industry treats this as “the norm” and invokes trade secrets, in reality, it is the falsification of transport documents. The law clearly prohibits entering false data in the consignment note—it is an act punishable by a financial penalty. Despite this, clients often explicitly demand CMR neutralization in the contract, threatening penalties for disclosing the true information. Both the carrier and the forwarder expose themselves to serious legal consequences and problems with insurance (the insurer may refuse to pay compensation if document forgery is discovered).
• Forwarders pretending to be carriers: A certain portion of forwarding companies present themselves to clients as if they were actual carriers with their own fleet, while in reality, they do not own a single vehicle. Such an intermediary advertises its transport services without clearly stating that it will only be an intermediary in commissioning the order to further subcontractors. Clients may think they are cooperating directly with a transport company (which suggests greater control over the service execution), but in fact, they get another forwarder in the supply chain. The problem arises when an incident occurs—e.g., a delay or damage to the goods—and the responsibility is blurred because formally the contract was for forwarding, not for carriage. A forwarder impersonating a carrier is a lack of transparency: the client does not know who is ultimately transporting their goods, and the carrier may not know the real client. This practice often goes hand in hand with the neutralization of documents and is sometimes an attempt to circumvent regulations. Professional forwarding companies always state what role they play and do not pretend to be something they are not—if an intermediary conceals the lack of its own trucks, it is a sign that it is only interested in the commission, not in a reliable service.