Freight theft risk is rising

Freight theft is getting harder to spot because it often no longer looks like theft. The load is booked through normal channels. The paperwork looks clean. The carrier profile appears real. Then the truck shows up, the freight leaves, and by the time anyone notices something is wrong, the goods may already be headed into resale markets. That is the core finding of a new FreightWaves investigation, which used a Southern California bust involving more than $1 million in stolen Alo and Skims merchandise to show how far stolen freight can travel before anyone realizes the handoff was fraudulent (freightwaves.com, abc7.com). That speed matters because the numbers are getting worse. Verisk CargoNet said estimated cargo-theft losses in the United States and Canada reached nearly $725 million in 2025, up 60 percent from 2024. Confirmed cargo thefts rose 18 percent to 2,646 incidents, and the average loss per theft climbed to $273,990 as organized groups shifted toward higher-value shipments. The total count of supply-chain crime events barely changed. The money did. Criminals are stealing smarter, not just more often (verisk.com, cargonet.com). The change is tactical. CargoNet and insurers now distinguish between old-fashioned cargo theft and “strategic” theft. In the old model, thieves cut seals, raid parked trailers, or hit warehouses. In the new one, they manipulate the transaction itself. They steal or spoof a carrier identity, create fake dispatch records, intercept a brokered load, and pick it up with the shipper’s permission because every screen in the chain says the driver is legitimate. Travelers says strategic cargo theft grew nearly 1,500 percent from 2022 to 2024. Overhaul’s 2025 annual report says deceptive pickup fraud kept rising last year as thieves exploited weak handoff and visibility controls (travelers.com, over-haul.com). That is why the real failure often happens before the trailer moves. FreightWaves argues that losses begin upstream, in onboarding, verification, and exception handling. A fake certificate. A last-minute phone-number change. A carrier account that passes a quick check but not a careful one. A pickup request that feels slightly off and still gets approved because the load has to move. The federal government has been warning about exactly this kind of identity abuse. FMCSA says fraud can involve unauthorized use of a real carrier’s USDOT number or someone acting as a broker without proper registration, and it has been rolling out stronger identity verification in its registration systems to close those gaps (freightwaves.com, fmcsa.dot.gov). Once the load is gone, recovery becomes a race against a market that is built to absorb goods fast. The FBI treats cargo theft as a transnational organized-crime problem because the theft is only the first step. The real business is liquidation. High-demand products move through warehouses, online storefronts, gray-market distributors, and informal resale networks before a claim is even filed. That is what made the Van Nuys seizure useful as a case study. Police found branded apparel worth about $1 million, but the larger point was that the goods were already positioned for sale. The freight had not vanished. It had entered commerce under a different story (fbi.gov, abc7.com). The industry has started to respond, but the response itself shows how deep the problem runs. The Transportation Intermediaries Association says it has pushed hundreds of fraud reports to federal authorities since launching its anti-fraud effort in 2024, helping produce indictments and recover stolen freight. That is real progress. It is also small beside the scale of the exposure. Freight still moves through a chain full of rushed approvals, fragmented systems, and human workarounds. A thief does not need to beat every control. Just the first weak one, before pickup, while the warehouse is still expecting a legitimate truck (drttransportation.com, freightwaves.com).