Toll fraud rarely makes the list when fleets think about where they’re losing money. Cargo theft, fuel costs, insurance: those get the attention. But a stolen transponder can quietly rack up tens of thousands of dollars before anyone notices, and by then the window to dispute it may already be closing.
That was the theme of the latest episode in the Transflo Partnership Series, where Don Everhart, Head of Partnerships and Strategy at Transflo, sat down with Jennifer Santamarina, Solution Engineer at Fleetworthy, to talk through Toll Genius by Fleetworthy, a toll management solution that connects toll and telematics data from Transflo, to catch fraud and billing errors before they cost you.
Watch the full webinar here: Transflo Partnership Series: Preventing Toll Fraud with Toll Genius (Feat. Fleetworthy)
Here’s what they covered.
The problem hiding in plain sight
Fraud lives in a lot of places across the supply chain, but tolling is one of the last places most fleets think to look. Jennifer, who started her career focused on tolls and spent time as a customer success manager before Toll Genius launched, said the volume of fraud reports she saw firsthand was eye-opening.
The mechanics are simple. A driver stops to refuel or grab food, and a transponder gets pulled from the windshield or the cab. From there it gets used by someone else, often in a region the fleet doesn’t even operate in. Without GPS reconciliation cross-referencing the transponder against the vehicle’s actual location, there’s no alert, and worse, no easy way to prove to the tolling agency that the charges weren’t yours.
Jennifer shared a story that captures it well. A customer told her flatly they’d never experienced fraud and didn’t need protection. A month later they called back: two transponders had been stolen and used across the Northeast, an area they didn’t travel. The total came to roughly $20,000 from just two transponders.
Fraud is only half the leak
Beyond outright theft, there’s leakage, paying more for tolls than you should. Toll pricing has three tiers, from lowest to highest cost:
- Transponder: the lowest rate
- Plate: carries at least a 20% upcharge nationwide, and can run two to four times higher in the Northeast
- Violation: penalties that stack on top
When a transaction registers to a license plate instead of a transponder (often because a newly added vehicle never got coverage), the fleet overpays on every single toll. Across an entire fleet, that adds up fast.
How Toll Genius catches it
The solution uses Transflo telematics data, surfacing the results in several reports you can act on from the Toll Genius dashboard. A few of the key ones:
Fleet Inventory Report cross-references which vehicles are in Transflo, which are covered by Fleetworthy toll protection, and which are missing from one system or the other. That match lets you catch coverage gaps before a truck hits the road and starts incurring violations.
Toll Match Report compares each toll event against the vehicle’s GPS location. Most events match, and in one example, around 89-90%. The ones that don’t fall into two buckets: a no match (transponder and vehicle both moving but in different locations) and a vehicle anomaly. When the report shows a transponder in New York while the truck sits in Florida, that’s a strong signal something is wrong. As Don put it, a transponder isn’t like AirPods; nobody leaves it on a diner table by accident, so a disconnect is a heavy indicator of fraud. The report even highlights the distance between the two, and the further apart they are, the more likely something happened.
Toll Discrepancy Report shows a vehicle’s complete history so you can drill into mismatches, pull up the timestamped map, and submit a credit request to the agency with GPS evidence attached, turning weeks of back-and-forth into a documented dispute.
Toll Mileage Report brings toll mileage into the ecosystem, which not every agency reliably provides. Beyond tolling, it’s useful for compliance and audit validation.
Plate management and real savings
One of Don Everhart’s favorite features is plate management, drawn from his own past life at a brokerage with a heavy trailer pull. Trailers hauled across tolls with no direct control over the carrier meant bills that showed up 6, 8, even 10 weeks later, impossible to reconcile or bill back. Deploying a managed solution gave him detailed visibility into what happened at each toll station and saved thousands of dollars in billbacks that would otherwise have been unrecoverable.
For vehicles running on plate toll, Toll Genius can recommend the right transponder type based on the vehicle’s actual routes and let you order it directly, closing the leakage gap. (There’s also an all-inclusive option, the Complete Pass+, for vehicles that travel nationwide.)
Where the ROI shows up
The Optimization Report is the headline. It examines each vehicle, checks whether it has a transponder, and, if it’s incurring plate tolls, analyzes its route patterns to recommend the right transponder, showing exactly how much plate toll was charged versus what you’d save by switching. It also flags mismatched or wrong-region transponders when a vehicle gets domiciled somewhere new.
The rest of the return comes from:
- Proactive fraud alerts that surface anomalies before someone notices a truck spending far more than the rest of the fleet
- Beating the clock on disputes: many agencies close the dispute window after 90 days, and some take nearly that long to even send the bill (Jennifer has seen one take a full year)
- Fewer violations from the two systems keeping coverage in sync
- Time saved managing everything (ordering, replacing, assigning, and reassigning transponders) from one familiar portal
From the Q&A
A few audience questions rounded out the session:
- Route optimization: A built-in toll calculator maps every route option between two points, factoring in vehicle size, weight, and tire count, and shows the toll cost for each. It surfaces the most optimized route first but lets you weigh cost against time, useful whether you’re hauling refrigerated goods on a deadline or looking for the zero-toll path. One customer recently saved tens of thousands by taking an alternative route.
- No transponder? You can run on plate alone and still tie the data back; a choice some customers make to keep less technology in the cab.
- Using Geotab? Yes, Toll Genius can integrate with it.
The takeaway
The recurring theme across the whole conversation was proactive versus reactive. Toll fraud and leakage are easy to miss until the bills pile up and the dispute window has closed. By pairing Transflo telematics with Fleetworthy toll data, Toll Genius turns tolling from a blind spot into something you can see, manage, and recover on.
Interested in learning more about Toll Genius? Reach out to the Transflo team, and keep an eye out for future episodes of the Transflo Partnership Series.