Fewer heists, bigger hauls: cargo thieves have learned to pick their targets

The people stealing freight off American highways are stealing less of it and making far more money, and that shift tells you the crime has changed hands.

Verisk CargoNet's second-quarter analysis, released this month, recorded 677 cargo theft incidents across the US and Canada, down 26 per cent from a year earlier and 14 per cent from the first quarter. Yet estimated losses more than doubled over the same period, reaching $304.6 million against $135.7 million a year ago. The average loss where a value was reported hit $564,009, inflated by a handful of multimillion-dollar hits.

The commodities tell the story. Metal thefts rose from 54 incidents to 80, with copper the prime target alongside aluminium, nickel and tungsten, tracking the same industrial-metal prices that have climbed all year. Organised groups also kept hunting enterprise technology: servers, networking gear and cryptocurrency-mining hardware, shipments that can be worth millions but move as ordinary dry freight, creating a mismatch between their value and the security around them. As CargoNet's Keith Lewis put it, the groups driving the biggest losses are not trying to steal more freight, they are trying to identify the right shipment.

The method has shifted too. Physical theft of unattended trailers and non-delivery fraud using newly acquired carrier authorities fell, particularly in California and Texas, the historic hotspots. What held steady were the digital schemes: business email compromise and shipment misdirection, in which thieves impersonate a legitimate carrier or broker and simply have the load delivered to themselves.

That is the uncomfortable takeaway for an industry already reeling from broker-liability rulings and enforcement crackdowns. The threat is no longer the smash-and-grab at a truck stop but the compromised inbox and the fraudulent booking. Fewer criminals are involved, they are more sophisticated, and every load they select is worth more than the ones they leave behind. Lower volume is not lower risk. It is concentrated risk.