Nightmare Broker - Please Help!!

Need some guidance on what to do in this situation.

First off, I am an independent dispatcher and I booked a dry van load for my carrier. It was a same day pick and drop and this is essentially how it went.

1) Load booked with broker at 10:30 with driver 2 hours out (100 miles maybe)

2) Broker called shortly after to inform me that they mixed up the orders, ours had a pickup appointment for 10:00 and a drop at 18:00. Notice that it’s already past the pickup appt time

3) Broker calls back a few mins later to confirm shipper will work us in when we arrive

4) Carrier arrives to shipper, takes about 3 hours to load them. Give drop ETA of 20:30 (about 300 miles)

5) Broker comes back and says receiving facility is aware of the new ETA and prepared

6) Carrier arrives to receiver and they won’t unload him. Spends all night there and nothing from broker

7) I get on with the receiving facility the next day to learn that they don’t work people in and only give a 30 min grace period, next appt is 2 weeks out

8) I inform broker (but they really already know this). I tell them we aren’t waiting around, schedule a return to shipper or we’ll put the shipment in storage and bill you. Broker’s manager gets involved and admits this load should’ve never been booked

9) 2 days later, now Friday, the broker says we finally got through to customer, please return to shipper and they’ll match the rate and pay 2 days of layer at $175 each. Said they were getting our appointment confirmation number (about 300 miles back)

10) Carrier arrives at shipper and they have no record of our delivery. I inform broker they won’t unload us because they need an appointment number, nothing from the broker. I tell him we’ll leave in a few minutes if we don’t hear back

11) Carrier leaves, goes home (about 350 miles) with load.

What do we do here? We have 44k pounds of a big company’s property, the broker is unprofessional, my carrier doesn’t have another trailer so this is losing them money. Seriously, this is a cluster F—K.

Any help is appreciated

Jay, this sounds like a real nightmare. I am just a company driver with absolutely no experience with brokerage. But I do have a lot of business experience and these are my thoughts.

You have 44K of somebody’s product. First question: what is the product and what is it worth? It’s seems like it would be similar to getting your car impounded and having to pay the fine and the tow to get it back. So you have leverage and the owner of the product should be on your side to get you paid fairly for everything you have had to do. And especially the driver needs to be paid. I don’t know if holding the shipment hostage is legal, not being a lawyer, but whoever screwed this up needs to be held accountable.

I hope one of our O/O’s knows how to handle this and will comment. I hate to see people lied to and then losing time and money on wild goose chases.

This type scenario is why I have developed relationships with a couple brokers for when I need to use them. Many are like this, and screw the O/O over.

Contact the shipper yourself and explain from your perspective what has happened and you need to return their property asap, otherwise you will have to cross dock it , get the legal dept involved and charge them storage and loading/unloading charges at a bare minimum.

That will generally get them interested in helping to be part of the solution.

Get everything in writing.

Second piece of advise. Report this broker to fmcsa , better business buerau and never do business with them again.

Good luck.