How cargo thieves attack the U.S. supply chain

America’s supply chain is under attack.

From coast to coast, organized criminal groups are hitting trucks on the road, breaking into warehouses and pilfering expensive items from train cars, according to industry experts and law enforcement officials CNBC interviewed during a six-month investigation.

It’s all part of a record surge in cargo theft in which criminal networks in the U.S. and abroad exploit technology intended to improve supply chain efficiency and use it to steal truckloads of valuable products. Armed with doctored invoices, the fraudsters impersonate the staff of legitimate companies in order to divert cargo into the hands of criminals.

The widespread scheme is “low risk and a very high reward,” according to Keith Lewis, vice president of Verisk CargoNet, which tracks theft trends in the industry.

“The return on investment is almost 100%,” he said. “And if there’s no risk of getting caught, why not do it better and do it faster?”

In 2024, Verisk CargoNet recorded 3,798 incidents of cargo theft, representing a 26% increase over 2023.

Total reported losses topped nearly $455 million, according to Verisk CargoNet, but industry experts told CNBC that number is likely lower than the true toll because many cases go unreported. Numerous experts who spoke to CNBC estimate losses are close to $1 billion or more a year.

Train cargo thefts alone shot up about 40% in 2024, with more than 65,000 reported incidents, according to the Association of American Railroads.

Industry experts and law enforcement officials say a more sophisticated and insidious form of cargo theft called strategic theft is also on the rise.

The way the system is supposed to work is this: A shipper pays a broker, and the broker, after taking its fee, pays the carrier, the trucking company that moves the load.

In strategic theft, criminals use deceptive tactics to trick shippers, brokers or carriers into handing cargo or legitimate payments, sometimes both, over to them instead of the legitimate companies.

Strategic theft represented 8% of all cargo theft in 2020, according to Verisk CargoNet figures, but by the end of 2024, it had risen to represent about one-third.

Tracking down the fraudsters, particularly if they are overseas, is almost an impossible task, Lewis said.

“Think of identity theft,” Lewis said. “Think of a friend that’s had their identity stolen or their credit card stolen. There’s no difference … There’s no bread crumb trail to follow. It’s a ghost.”

Verisk CargoNet said it has tracked criminal groups that have tried to disrupt the U.S. supply chain to origins in 32 countries.

“There’s no deterrent for these guys,” said Jerry Jacobs, who oversees risk management at Prosponsive Logistics in Atlanta. The company is a broker connecting shippers with the carriers that move their products.

In an interview with CNBC, Jacobs said the criminals “literally have a license to steal.”

“You’re hiding out in a foreign country, and all you need is a cell phone and a computer to conduct this type of fraud,” he said.

“Every day, we’re seeing the bad guys trying to infiltrate our network. And our sales reps have to constantly stay vigilant,” Jacobs said. “I say this all the time to my sales folks, that there’s probably a 33% chance that you’re going to be talking to a bad guy that’s looking to steal freight.”

Jacobs told CNBC during his interview in February that he was actively dealing with a fraud case. The offenders had stolen his company’s identity and were booking shipments, he said. Their goal was to convince a legitimate trucking company to pick up a shipment and unwittingly deliver it so that the criminals, rather than the real carriers, would get paid, he said.

Jacobs showed CNBC the online platform used by brokers to book shipments, called DAT Freight and Analytics. There were listings purportedly initiated by his company, but they weren’t legitimate — they were booked, he said, by the criminals.

“Right now, we’re dealing with a ton of calls about this,” Jacobs said at the time. “A lot of [carriers], unfortunately, picked up the shipment already for the bad guys, and they have already delivered it for the bad guys.”

Weeks later, Jacobs was still dealing with the fallout. He said some of the loads were delivered, but not others, suggesting cargo and payments were stolen in the scheme. None of the carriers were paid, he said.

Jacobs said crime costs the average consumer, too, as cargo theft fuels retail price increases.

“I have to pay more at the grocery store, at the checkout line, because these bad guys want to come in and steal freight,” he said.

Barry Conlon, founder and CEO of Overhaul, an in-transit supply chain security and risk management company based in Austin, Texas, said the crime groups are very familiar with how freight is moved across the U.S.

“They have people who are literally pulling the information off websites, scraping it, in some cases,” Conlon told CNBC. “And then they’re attacking at a chosen location once they see the product they want. And it’s literally gone into the supply chain within days.”

He contrasted the ease and payoff of cargo theft to the high risk and often lower reward of a bank robbery.

“Rob a million-dollar load, that’s going to give you hundreds of thousands of dollars in return. And there’s literally no risk,” he said.

Cargo theft, which is almost always nonviolent, is considered a property crime. According to industry experts, it’s underreported for a reason.

“A lot of cases, they don’t report it because they feel they’re not going to get it back. It’s been weeks since they lost it and they’ve just found out about it,” Conlon said.

Overhaul estimates there will be a 22% increase in incidents of cargo theft in 2025, according to the company’s most recent report on trends in the industry.

Scott Cornell, the national transportation leader for insurance company Travelers Insurance, said he is also alarmed at what he’s seeing in the industry.

“[There are] two things that I always point out about the organized cargo theft rings that are committing these crimes,” Cornell said. “They know what to steal and when to steal it, and they’re really good at return on investment.”

Food and beverage is the thieves’ No. 1 targeted commodity, according to Verisk CargoNet.

“It’s consumable. So, the evidence disappears,” Cornell said. “It’s hard to chase. If you’re a cargo theft investigator and you’re trying to do a recovery investigation, the evidence is going be consumed, right? Or it’s going to spoil. There’s no barcode on a pistachio.”

Household goods are the second-most commonly targeted cargo, followed by electronics, Verisk CargoNet found.

Cargo loss isn’t something many retailers are eager to talk about.

Meta, which was hit by a $500,000 theft of its Ray-Ban and Oculus glasses last year in Texas, declined to comment to CNBC. Nike, whose sneakers are favorites of cargo thieves, according to police and court records, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

The problem is “noticeably increasing,” said Birger Buesching, head of the supply chain for Philips’ personal health consumer business, which includes Sonicare toothbrushes and Norelco shavers, among other products.

“Two, three years ago, I didn’t have to worry about this,” Buesching told CNBC in February at the Manifest Conference in Las Vegas, where companies that focus on the supply chain showcased solutions to protect it. “But we do see an uptick in any kind of commercial shipments, bigger value shipments that are going out to our customers or traditional retail customers.”

Replacing a stolen load is not so simple, he said.

“First of all, we can’t ship that load on time and in full as we promise, so we’re letting our customers down,” Buesching said. “Often we have safety stock, so we can usually backfill orders very quickly, within days. But especially when you have custom-made products, then it might take a little longer, because you have to make more of that product.”

Ellen Kapiloff, vice president of operations for North and Central America at Lacoste, said the threat of cargo theft can lead to inventory challenges on the floor.

“If you’re a consumer and you wanted this shirt and we only made 100 of them and 50 of them were stolen, we are strategically going to place the other 50 in a different location, as well as a different channel,” Kapiloff told CNBC in an interview at the Manifest conference. “So, it might not be available to you at a store or online when you want it.”

Coincidentally, in February, just 10 days after CNBC spoke with Kapiloff, California Highway Patrol’s Cargo Theft Interdiction Program served a search warrant at a store in Los Angeles’ fashion district. Officers found five boxes containing Lacoste slides footwear that law enforcement said was part of a large cargo heist.

California sees more cargo theft than any other state in the U.S.

In a separate case, in May 2024, athletic apparel retailer Lululemon reported a burglary at a distribution center in Ontario, California, in which thieves made off with “well over a million dollars’ worth of Lululemon product,” according to the California Highway Patrol.

Police said a person was arrested on suspicion of selling the stolen goods.

In a statement to CNBC, Lululemon said, “Retail crime, including cargo theft, is a serious industry-wide challenge, and we are taking decisive action to combat it. … In this specific case, our collaborative investigation led to arrests and recovery of stolen products.”

While there are financial impacts, cargo theft has been mentioned only sparingly in public companies’ earnings conference calls and investor webcasts over the last year.

Knight-Swift is the industry’s largest full truckload carrier, but it has only spoken publicly about cargo theft once in the past year, according to a CNBC document search. CEO Adam Miller noted on the company’s October earnings call that it is “starting to hear a lot more comments around cargo security.”

“I’ve gone to different conferences here over the last few months, and cargo theft is now a prevailing topic when it really wasn’t discussed that much in the past,” Miller said.

On a January conference call for transportation company Landstar, Chief Financial Officer Jim Todd explained to investors that the increase in its insurance and claim costs in 2024 compared with 2023 was “primarily attributable to increased severity on cargo claims, primarily due to cargo theft and fraud in the supply chain.”

Trucking company J.B. Hunt mentioned cargo theft more often over the past year than other publicly traded companies in the industry, though it was still light on details. In April 2024, the company’s president of highway services, Bradley Hicks, said technology has “opened new avenues for bad actors to engage in sophisticated strategic theft, giving these organized groups access to thousands of loads through our platform.”

Hicks added J.B. Hunt is “making some adjustments to harden the security of our system.”

Not everyone is raising alarms.

C.H. Robinson has 450,000 contracted carriers and handles more than $2 billion in freight annually. The company’s success rate in deterring theft and fraud is “99.999%,” according to Michael Castagnetto, C.H. Robinson’s North American surface transportation president, who oversees cargo theft for the logistics company.

“In January, for example, our North American trucking division recorded only two incidents. To put that in perspective: We move over 5 million truckload shipments a year,” Castagnetto told CNBC.

Castagnetto said the company has strategies to weed out potential fraudsters, but, he added, “I can’t give you all the details, because we don’t want the bad actors to know how we catch them.”

Cargo transportation companies of all sizes are working to address the rise in theft.

Julia Fulton, director of corporate communications at TQL, the second-largest freight brokerage firm in the U.S., said the company has invested $4 million in technology and specialized personnel to combat the issue.

Nolan Transportation Group said in a statement that protecting customers from cargo theft is a “top priority.”

“We take a proactive, data-driven approach, focusing on early detection and prevention to ensure the security of shipments,” Katie Wild, vice president of marketing at Nolan, said in the statement. “We continuously strengthen our carrier onboarding process with additional security measures and increased real-time monitoring to proactively address fraudulent activities and identify suspicious behavior before it escalates.”

DAT Freight and Analytics, the online platform widely used by brokers to book shipments, shows where freight is being moved around the country by a carrier and the broker that handled the transaction.

Jeff Hopper, the chief marketing officer of DAT, said 90% of all fraud that takes place in the cargo industry is identity theft. He said Prosponsive Logistics “reported the phishing attack to DAT, and we worked with them to address it. We encourage all customers to report suspicious activity so we can respond appropriately.”

To combat strategic theft, he said DAT employs a team that spots attempts at illegal activity about a dozen times a day.

“We have a whole team of people that that’s all they do all day long — 25 people all day long — is chase these things down and remove those people that we know to be bad actors,” Hopper said. “Our biggest investment that we’re making is to fight that battle and to put the protections in place for our customers so that they don’t have to worry about that.”

Targeting criminals before they disrupt the supply chain is the core business for Highway, a security company based in Dallas.

“It’s like a virus,” Highway CEO Jordan Graft said in an interview. “So, whenever an industry or a segment becomes infected, it spreads. … These aren’t just single individual actors deciding to wake up one day and say, ‘I’m going to target freight brokers in the U.S.’ They’re working in groups and cohorts.”

Highway itself is also regularly targeted by criminal groups trying to infiltrate the security service and disrupt its ability to flag fraud to clients, it said.

The company said its software blocked more than 914,000 fraud attempts last year. It also said 9,829 carrier users from 75 countries tried to get unauthorized access to its platform. The company said it believes those users wanted to steal the identity of legitimate motor carriers.

Highway said most of those attempts originated from six countries: India, Mexico, Moldova, Pakistan, Serbia and Uzbekistan.

Highway alerts its customers if there’s a change to a company’s phone number, email or address on the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s site, where shippers register.

“If [hackers] can gain access to the carrier’s information, if they can get control of the carrier’s email inbox or they can phish the carrier to sharing a code with them, then they can change that information,” Graft said. “So, doing it thousands of times a month — it’s relatively easy.”

He said the FMCSA needs better support to protect carriers, brokers and shippers, a concern that several brokers shared with CNBC.

“I think they are doing the best they can,” Graft said. “You’re asking an under-resourced government agency whose mandate is motor carrier safety to try and attempt to fight a cybercrime attack on behalf of an entire industry.”

Chris Burroughs, CEO of the Transportation Intermediaries Association, agreed that it’s been “too easy for these scammers” to hack the FMCSA system.

“The fraud has been going on for years. These are well-organized crime rings,” he said.

FMCSA spokesman Matt Schuck, in a statement to CNBC, said: “The agency continuously introduces security enhancements and upgrades to help safeguard the commercial motor vehicle industry and the American public. Recent initiatives to combat cargo theft include implementing multi-factor authentication across all FMCSA systems and strengthening security protocols. Additionally, FMCSA is developing a modernized registration system featuring even stronger safeguards and processes.”

In response to the surge in cargo theft, U.S. Rep. David Valadao, R-Calif., along with other lawmakers, in April introduced a bipartisan bill called the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act. The bill would set up a coordination center within the Department of Homeland Security tasked with fighting cargo theft and organized retail crime.

“It incorporates the FBI and Homeland Security,” Valadao told CNBC, “and it creates the task force [to] communicate with my local agencies but also amongst themselves so that they can be informed about what’s going on … around the district or even around the country.”

The legislation is pending.

On the other side of Congress, the Senate Subcommittee on Surface Transportation, Freight, Pipelines, and Safety has taken a particular focus on cargo theft.

“In this era of increasing permeability of our southern border, in particular, we’ve seen a lot of criminal elements come through, including those who are engaging in cargo theft,” said Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., who chairs the subcommittee.

In an interview in his Senate office, Young said the FMCSA is “unable” to identify and remove fraudsters from online shipping systems.

“That means a lot in this age of e-commerce, when people depend on this website,” he said, “to identify appropriate shippers and to trust in that information.”

The Household Goods Shipping Consumer Protection Act, a bipartisan bill introduced in the Senate, would give the FMCSA authority to impose civil penalties and other stricter regulations against fraudsters.

— CNBC’s Agne Tolockaite contributed to this report.