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CargoNet found an increasingly sophisticated threat landscape with criminals demonstrating tactical adaptability. (CHUYN/Getty Images)

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The trucking industry faced an unprecedented number of cargo thefts throughout 2024, according to experts.

reported that cargo theft incidents to a record 3,625 across North America. The estimated average value per theft increased 7.7% to $202,364. The top targets were copper products, consumer electronics, cryptocurrency mining hardware and consumable goods.

“When you automate a bad process, you do it bad faster,” said Keith Lewis, vice president of operations at CargoNet. “The back-office software that companies are using are doing all kinds of character recognition, they’re reading the documents, the PDFs, and they’re moving them through their system, not realizing that a lot of these documents have different fonts and they’re forged.”

CargoNet found an increasingly sophisticated threat landscape with criminals demonstrating tactical adaptability. Traditional straight theft methods remained prevalent even as theft-by-deception schemes gained prominence.

“Those groups have gotten more sophisticated too,” Lewis said. “Back in the old days, they would just go to the truck stop and break into the trucks, and whatever they got was potluck, to following a truck from an electronics distributor, to now, following a truck a little ways, knowing which way it’s going to go, and making a phone call ahead to the vehicle that’s actually going to break into it.”

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(Verisk CargoNet)

Lewis added that teams can keep repeating these relay tactics. He also highlighted that criminals sometimes buy smaller carriers in order to conduct scams, gaining clean records, proper registrations and customer information in one go.

“It’s a challenging environment,” said Jared Fritts, a loss control specialist at IAT Insurance Group. “It just does not seem like it’s improving. I think the numbers back that up, year after year, industrywide. It’s just a really challenging environment out there on the cargo theft side. Both on the traditional theft and the strategic theft.”

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Fritts noted criminals used to be more focused on traditional straight thefts. This meant activity was concentrated in particular hot spots that often required the physical presence of criminals. But that has since changed.

“This is organized crime, a lot of it possibly overseas,” Fritts said. “When you’re talking about the strategic or fraud-based theft, they don’t have to be geographically located and that’s what the industry is fighting right now.”

IAT has worked to be proactive when it comes to providing its policyholders information about cargo theft best practices and industry trends. The goal is to keep them aware of what is going on, so they know when and where problems might occur.

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“There’s a lot of factors that came into play in 2024,” said Ron Greene, executive vice president for risk, intelligence and response at Overhaul. “Not just criminal factors, not just crime, but also economic factors that have really driven supply chain risk to a whole new level. We continue to see unprecedented levels of cargo theft by many different means.”

Greene was optimistic there would at least be a slowdown as the industry adapted to the new criminal tactics. But criminals kept innovating their approach. He also warned the freight downturn has driven some legitimate carriers to crime.

“Unfortunately trucking companies are struggling to stay afloat, especially the small ones,” Greene said. “Some of them have turned to crime to keep their businesses alive. We have data and evidence that confirms information around that. It’s few and far between, but it is driving this scenario.”

Overhaul launched FraudWatch as a way to help companies identify potentially bad actors and suspicious activity. The software processes real-time data to detect scams.

(Overhaul via LinkedIn)

“I’ve been doing this a long time and we thought 2023 was bad, but 2024 blew its doors off,” said Zak Bowyer, vice president of sales support operations at Total Quality Logistics. “The worst year we’ve experienced so far. We don’t really expect much to change going forward. But while it was a really hard year, a lot of really good things happened throughout the industry.”

TQL ranks No. 9 on the Transport Topics Top 100 list of the largest logistics companies in North America, and No. 2 on the list of top freight brokerage firms.

TQL reported its cargo theft incidents decreased significantly during the year despite the broader industry trend. Bowyer has also seen an increase in collaboration among industry stakeholders. This includes companies developing technology solutions to help brokers combat the threat. Some carriers create their software solutions in-house.

“We saw the rise of what we would call strategic infiltration in 2024,” Bowyer said. “Our techniques for combating that moved less toward training our staff and putting things in place to prevent that sort of social engineering, and more to, I would say, behavioral analytics and insight.”

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