For most of the past decade, freight visibility has largely meant one thing: knowing where a truck is at any given moment.
Carriers connected their ELDs, while brokers and shippers integrated telematics feeds into their operations. The traditional practice of calling drivers simply to ask for their current location gradually faded away. The shift removed a huge amount of manual work and has since become a basic expectation across the industry. For brokers, 3PLs and shippers, real-time location data is now considered standard.
But knowing where a tracking signal places a truck does not necessarily mean knowing whether the load is safe, legitimate or progressing as expected.
According to Verisk CargoNet’s annual analysis, cargo theft losses reached an estimated $725 million in 2025, a 60% increase from the previous year. Strategic theft is also the fastest-growing category, involving methods such as identity fraud, double brokering, spoofed emails and compromised logins that can be used to reroute or steal entire shipments.
The limitation is that even a reliable tracking source was never designed to determine whether the signal actually belongs to the driver, truck or load it claims to represent. A telematics feed can accurately report a location while still being associated with the wrong truck if equipment was changed after the load was booked. In other situations, the signal itself can be manipulated through spoofing.
No single tracking source is completely protected against such exceptions.
A second, independent signal
Descartes MacroPoint’s response is ELD+, a new dual-source tracking capability designed to combine ELD and mobile app tracking within the same load-tracking session rather than treating the two methods as separate or competing sources of location data.
The concept draws on an idea already familiar in cybersecurity: multifactor authentication increases confidence because a system requires more than one independent factor to agree before trust is granted.
ELD+ applies a similar layered-validation principle to freight visibility. It brings together the telematics feed and the driver’s mobile device within one tracking session, creating two independent location signals.
Dual-source tracking is not intended to deliver a final verdict on whether something is wrong. Instead, it provides an additional risk signal.
When both sources agree, operations teams can have greater confidence in the shipment record. When they diverge, the discrepancy does not automatically prove fraud or another problem. It does, however, give the team a reason to investigate before a small tracking inconsistency becomes a larger operational exception or, ultimately, a claim.
Closing the gaps telematics cannot cover
The mobile component of ELD+ is designed to do more than deliver another GPS signal.
Through the Descartes MacroPoint for Truckers app, drivers can confirm arrival and departure milestones, take photos, capture documents and submit proof of delivery directly within the same tracking session.
Location data alone has clear limitations. A geofence trigger can indicate that a truck is close to a facility, for example, but it cannot confirm that the driver actually checked in. Likewise, a location history can show that a truck moved without providing the POD image a customer may be waiting to receive.
Historically, filling those gaps has required phone calls, email follow-ups and manual efforts to obtain milestones and paperwork that telematics cannot capture on its own.
Descartes MacroPoint OpsForce, the company’s suite of AI agents for freight visibility, is intended to reduce that workload. The system manages driver requests, follow-ups and confirmations for missing milestones and documents, helping tracking teams avoid manually chasing every outstanding item.
“AI innovations in our real-time visibility solution are designed to improve accuracy and responsiveness,” said Dan Cicerchi, general manager of transportation management at Descartes, regarding the OpsForce rollout.
Since its launch, Descartes says customers using OpsForce have achieved up to a 30% average increase in no-touch tracking automation, along with meaningful reductions in manual check calls.
A layer, not a silver bullet
Dual-source tracking is not intended to replace every other verification measure.
Effective risk reduction still depends on multiple layers, including carrier vetting, identity and equipment validation, in-transit monitoring, exception alerts and clearly defined escalation procedures. These controls need to work together because no individual measure can identify every potential problem.
That layered approach has become increasingly important as fraud techniques such as double brokering and business email compromise continue to grow more sophisticated.
What ELD+ brings to this broader risk-management structure is a second, independent point of comparison within the same tracking session that many operations teams already use.
For example, conflicting geographic information between the telematics feed and the mobile app could highlight a potential issue earlier. A mismatch could also suggest that equipment was changed after a load had been assigned. In either situation, the discrepancy becomes visible while there is still time for an operations team to investigate and ask questions.
Built on an established network
A two-signal tracking model is only useful if both signals are available at scale. This is where Descartes MacroPoint’s network and more than a decade of industry relationships become important.
The company’s network includes more than 2 million drivers using its mobile app, more than 250 global telematics integrations and approximately 3 million trucking assets connected for tracking.
One of the biggest challenges with driver-facing tracking technology is getting drivers to download and consistently use another platform.
Because the Descartes MacroPoint for Truckers app is already familiar to a broad segment of the carrier community, ELD+ does not require operations teams to convince drivers to adopt an entirely new habit. Instead, it activates a second source of information that drivers may already be equipped to provide.
The first generation of real-time visibility largely replaced the traditional check call. The next generation needs to go further: maintaining visibility when one source stops providing information and giving operations teams an additional, independent reason to trust the tracking data they receive.
One signal can indicate where a shipment appears to be. A second signal can help determine how much confidence should be placed in that information.
