Off the top of the Overdrive Radio podcast this week is the voice of fuel-payments provider Wex's Vice President of Global Anti-Financial Crimes William Fitzgerald, laying out a 1 in 12,000 transaction rate for detection of fraud over the company's entire fuel-payments network. That is, 1 in every 12,000 purchases are flagged as suspiscious, potentially fraudulent, and blocked in automated fashion among its millions upon millions of fuel transactions facilitated annually.
Translate that incidence to the roughly 350,000 fuel transactions National Association of Small Trucking Companies President David Owen knows move through the association’s own Quality Plus fuel network any given month, and that’s right at 30 transactions being held up by the system. William Fitzgerald was speaking at NASTC's annual conference to outline the evolving landscape of fuel fraud/theft for attendees and showcase tools within Wex's (and some other card providers') networks that are increasingly successful in helping carriers of all shapes and sizes eliminate fraud's impact. Along the way, too, the company's been able to reduce the rate of so-called "false positives," legimate fuel purchases held up by the card provider's systems. Fitzgerald's well aware such hold-ups can be particularly annoying, and unproductive. Illustrating the huge financial impact of stolen fuel, though, he asked this hypothetical question to a room of NASTC conference attendees:
"What would be an acceptable false-positive rate in your minds?" he asked. "How many good transactions would you be OK with me stopping to prevent a bad one?"
The goal is zero false positves, of course, as Wex and other card providers calibrate a variety of techs operating in the network's background to get there, in addition to more human-focused efforts aimed at education to prevent account takeovers and the like that can bring the biggest hits to a fuel buyer’s bottom line. Results from ongoing efforts at Wex in particular have been good in recent months, he said. "We've got overall, over the last 10 months, a 25% reduction in losses, a 32% reduction in false positives," and a big increase in detection, too, he said.
Those results he attributed largely to technical innovations in company’s network, some described in part in a recent paper authored by the company you'll find at this link: https://www.wexinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/WEX-Closed-Loop-Fleet-Card-White-Paper.pdf
But the human element in fraud prevention might be the biggest factor any size carrier can address to make the most gains in preventing losses, empowering themselves through self-education and passing that on to team members for those of you with more than just a single truck under your management. "We've seen the most yield" in fraud prevention, he said, "with education and empowerment."
Fitzgerald described efforts of Wex to illustrate the kinds of schemes that might result in infiltration of its own backend, including simulated phishing attacks through targeted fake emails designed to get a user to provide access to their login data with a goal of compromising accounts. Wex sends such emails to its own employees on occasion to lure them in, thus serving an educational purpose in awareness. Their most "successful" such an effort? An offer of "free Taylor Swift tickets. Everybody clicked on that," Fitzgerald said.
In the podcast, track through Fitzgerald's entire NASTC talk, tracking through those backend upgrades but also plenty more you can do to work with the company's team and tools in its system, like its SecureFuel solution, to prevent fuel theft. Likewise, should the worst, to work with law enforcement to apprehend the thieves.
Mentioned in the podcast:
**'Personal cyber hygiene' in age of social engineering hacks: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15755615
**More from NASTC's conference on insurance, ELD data: https://overdriveonline.com/15770374
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Off the top of the Overdrive Radio podcast this week is the voice of fuel-payments provider Wex's Vice President of Global Anti-Financial Crimes William Fitzgerald, laying out a 1 in 12,000 transaction rate for detection of fraud over the company's entire fuel-payments network. That is, 1 in every 12,000 purchases are flagged as suspiscious, potentially fraudulent, and blocked in automated fashion among its millions upon millions of fuel transactions facilitated annually.
Translate that incidence to the roughly 350,000 fuel transactions National Association of Small Trucking Companies President David Owen knows move through the association’s own Quality Plus fuel network any given month, and that’s right at 30 transactions being held up by the system. William Fitzgerald was speaking at NASTC's annual conference to outline the evolving landscape of fuel fraud/theft for attendees and showcase tools within Wex's (and some other card providers') networks that are increasingly successful in helping carriers of all shapes and sizes eliminate fraud's impact. Along the way, too, the company's been able to reduce the rate of so-called "false positives," legimate fuel purchases held up by the card provider's systems. Fitzgerald's well aware such hold-ups can be particularly annoying, and unproductive. Illustrating the huge financial impact of stolen fuel, though, he asked this hypothetical question to a room of NASTC conference attendees:
"What would be an acceptable false-positive rate in your minds?" he asked. "How many good transactions would you be OK with me stopping to prevent a bad one?"
The goal is zero false positves, of course, as Wex and other card providers calibrate a variety of techs operating in the network's background to get there, in addition to more human-focused efforts aimed at education to prevent account takeovers and the like that can bring the biggest hits to a fuel buyer’s bottom line. Results from ongoing efforts at Wex in particular have been good in recent months, he said. "We've got overall, over the last 10 months, a 25% reduction in losses, a 32% reduction in false positives," and a big increase in detection, too, he said.
Those results he attributed largely to technical innovations in company’s network, some described in part in a recent paper authored by the company you'll find at this link: https://www.wexinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/WEX-Closed-Loop-Fleet-Card-White-Paper.pdf
But the human element in fraud prevention might be the biggest factor any size carrier can address to make the most gains in preventing losses, empowering themselves through self-education and passing that on to team members for those of you with more than just a single truck under your management. "We've seen the most yield" in fraud prevention, he said, "with education and empowerment."
Fitzgerald described efforts of Wex to illustrate the kinds of schemes that might result in infiltration of its own backend, including simulated phishing attacks through targeted fake emails designed to get a user to provide access to their login data with a goal of compromising accounts. Wex sends such emails to its own employees on occasion to lure them in, thus serving an educational purpose in awareness. Their most "successful" such an effort? An offer of "free Taylor Swift tickets. Everybody clicked on that," Fitzgerald said.
In the podcast, track through Fitzgerald's entire NASTC talk, tracking through those backend upgrades but also plenty more you can do to work with the company's team and tools in its system, like its SecureFuel solution, to prevent fuel theft. Likewise, should the worst, to work with law enforcement to apprehend the thieves.
Mentioned in the podcast:
**'Personal cyber hygiene' in age of social engineering hacks: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15755615
**More from NASTC's conference on insurance, ELD data: https://overdriveonline.com/15770374
Small Fleet Champ semi-finalists not afraid to get their hands dirty in shop, behind the wheel
Overdrive Radio
30 minutes 50 seconds
2 months ago
Small Fleet Champ semi-finalists not afraid to get their hands dirty in shop, behind the wheel
This week on the podcast, the voices of two semi-finalists for Overdrive's 2025 Small Fleet Champ award:
First, Robbie and Levi Turnage of Mississippi-headquartered tanker fleet Turnage and Sons, LLC. They're respectively fourth- and fifth-generation milk haulers who've made good on a business with a stable of dairymen in the region specializing in organic milk over two decades of so Robbie's grown the fleet from just a single truck, following in the footsteps his father, grandfather and great grandfather before him -- the hands-on nature of each successive generation’s training and involvement in the shop, behind the wheel, and everything else that goes along with running a trucking business have no doubt contributed to the family business' longevity, with 19-year-old Levi now fully entrenched as well.
In the podcast, you'll hear the Turnages in conversation with Overdrive's own Long Haul Paul Marhoefer in the cab of Levi's 2005 Peterbilt 379 "Big Red" parked up in March at the Mid-America Trucking Show. Marhoefer wrote about the pair in a story published in July you can read here: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-extra/article/15751311/five-generations-trucking-the-turnage-familys-longevity-secret
Catch some pictures there of Big Red, too, which placed second in its class at the MATS show. Stay tuned for more reporting on the Small Fleet Champ contender in the coming weeks.
Also in the podcast, fellow semi-finalist MRL Transport owner Mark Ledford, who founded and grew Red Baron Transportation to 35 trucks over 15 years starting in the early part of the decade before selling out and restarting with just one truck in 2019 as MRL. That story aired just last week at https://www.overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ/article/15753736/mark-ledfords-mrl-transport-master-class-in-trucking-rightsizing
He’s up to five trucks now, with four drivers employed, and similarly gets his hands dirty behind the wheel himself, a fact key to both maintaining customer relationships spanning back decades now but also inking new business, as he tells in the podcast. Here, he takes even farther back to his origins in trucking working a dock in the 1980s, then his first OTR driving experience with a team operation. On his first run from North Carolina out to California his co-driver woke him up by turning the rig on its side in the middle of the night, memorably leaving Mark to climb out of a window and onto the cab's side, now upright, unable to find his glasses to sharpen the blurry lights all around him. Needless to say, as he notes in the podcast, he never would run team again.
Meet all Overdrive's 2025 Small Fleet Champ semi-finalists and read more about them through this month via https://overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ
Two Champs will be honored along with two fellow semi-finalists at Championship sponsor NASTC's annual conference October 23-25 in Nashville. More about NASTC: https://nastc.com
Overdrive Radio
Off the top of the Overdrive Radio podcast this week is the voice of fuel-payments provider Wex's Vice President of Global Anti-Financial Crimes William Fitzgerald, laying out a 1 in 12,000 transaction rate for detection of fraud over the company's entire fuel-payments network. That is, 1 in every 12,000 purchases are flagged as suspiscious, potentially fraudulent, and blocked in automated fashion among its millions upon millions of fuel transactions facilitated annually.
Translate that incidence to the roughly 350,000 fuel transactions National Association of Small Trucking Companies President David Owen knows move through the association’s own Quality Plus fuel network any given month, and that’s right at 30 transactions being held up by the system. William Fitzgerald was speaking at NASTC's annual conference to outline the evolving landscape of fuel fraud/theft for attendees and showcase tools within Wex's (and some other card providers') networks that are increasingly successful in helping carriers of all shapes and sizes eliminate fraud's impact. Along the way, too, the company's been able to reduce the rate of so-called "false positives," legimate fuel purchases held up by the card provider's systems. Fitzgerald's well aware such hold-ups can be particularly annoying, and unproductive. Illustrating the huge financial impact of stolen fuel, though, he asked this hypothetical question to a room of NASTC conference attendees:
"What would be an acceptable false-positive rate in your minds?" he asked. "How many good transactions would you be OK with me stopping to prevent a bad one?"
The goal is zero false positves, of course, as Wex and other card providers calibrate a variety of techs operating in the network's background to get there, in addition to more human-focused efforts aimed at education to prevent account takeovers and the like that can bring the biggest hits to a fuel buyer’s bottom line. Results from ongoing efforts at Wex in particular have been good in recent months, he said. "We've got overall, over the last 10 months, a 25% reduction in losses, a 32% reduction in false positives," and a big increase in detection, too, he said.
Those results he attributed largely to technical innovations in company’s network, some described in part in a recent paper authored by the company you'll find at this link: https://www.wexinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/WEX-Closed-Loop-Fleet-Card-White-Paper.pdf
But the human element in fraud prevention might be the biggest factor any size carrier can address to make the most gains in preventing losses, empowering themselves through self-education and passing that on to team members for those of you with more than just a single truck under your management. "We've seen the most yield" in fraud prevention, he said, "with education and empowerment."
Fitzgerald described efforts of Wex to illustrate the kinds of schemes that might result in infiltration of its own backend, including simulated phishing attacks through targeted fake emails designed to get a user to provide access to their login data with a goal of compromising accounts. Wex sends such emails to its own employees on occasion to lure them in, thus serving an educational purpose in awareness. Their most "successful" such an effort? An offer of "free Taylor Swift tickets. Everybody clicked on that," Fitzgerald said.
In the podcast, track through Fitzgerald's entire NASTC talk, tracking through those backend upgrades but also plenty more you can do to work with the company's team and tools in its system, like its SecureFuel solution, to prevent fuel theft. Likewise, should the worst, to work with law enforcement to apprehend the thieves.
Mentioned in the podcast:
**'Personal cyber hygiene' in age of social engineering hacks: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15755615
**More from NASTC's conference on insurance, ELD data: https://overdriveonline.com/15770374
