Scott Cornell is Chief Risk Officer at SPG Cargo & Logistics and Chairman of TAPA Americas, the Transported Asset Protection Association’s North American chapter.
Cargo theft has notoriously favored certain states, corridors, and freight hubs where the concentration of loads made it worth setting up operations. California has been number one for as long as anyone in this industry can remember, and that’s not likely to change. But what is moving right now is worth paying attention to.
For years, the conversation about cargo theft geography started and ended with California. That was the primary epicenter where organized rings concentrated because that’s where the freight concentrated. That logic makes sense for what the industry calls straight theft: someone physically going out and taking a load. Strategic theft breaks that logic entirely.
When your method relies on deception — when you’re double brokering loads, running fictitious pickups, impersonating carriers — you don’t need to be near a freight hub. You can target the exact load you want, wherever it happens to be. The freight comes to you, in a sense. And that changes everything about where these operations set up and how they move.
What we’re seeing in the data reflects that. Verisk CargoNet’s Q1 data based on voluntarily reported cargo theft incidents shows that Texas is still number two, but it’s down. New Jersey jumped into the third spot in the first quarter, and that’s not a blip — there are three or four organized rings known to be actively working the Northeast right now, concentrating heavily on meat, seafood, metals, and alcohol. The New York and New Jersey corridor is getting hit hard. These areas had quieted down in terms of cargo theft for quite some time — still showing up in the top 10, but not surging as they had years ago.
The commodity shifts tell a similar story. Food and beverage is still the top target, but we’re seeing meaningful increases in cosmetics, perfumes, and personal care products. CargoNet’s data reflects it, and it matches what we’re hearing across the industry. The logic behind it isn’t complicated: these rings go after freight that’s easy to move. Meat and alcohol sell fast. So do perfumes. High value, low traceability, strong secondary market demand. When you understand that targeting logic, the shifts start to make sense.
The recent numbers aren’t all bad. They also highlight an encouraging trend in the fantastic efforts of law enforcement.
Cargo theft was down quarter over quarter in Q1. We would need to see two or three quarters of decline before it’s safe to call it a real trend, but a real part of this decrease is law enforcement and the private sector working together to do exceptional work. The cargo theft task forces operating in California right now, particularly the Cargo Theft Interdiction Program, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s task force, and the LAPD unit, have been busting warehouse after warehouse and making arrests. Any decline in California can certainly be attributed at least in part to these efforts. Federal involvement has also increased substantially and is being coordinated well with regional task forces and the private sector.
That kind of pressure makes a difference, and it’s showing up in the data.
What it doesn’t do is close the structural gap that strategic theft exploits. Law enforcement can disrupt a ring, prosecute its members, shut down a warehouse full of stolen freight. What it can’t easily do is fix the point in the logistics process where the theft is actually happening — which is often at the moment of pickup. Whether through double brokering scams or fictitious pickups, this is a notoriously vulnerable point in freight. But it isn’t the only weakness.
The method I’ve been calling the Trojan Driver Scam is an example of an emerging method that exploits the trust built into our existing processes and systems. A criminal network identifies a legitimate carrier — real authority, real insurance, real history — and inserts one of their own people as a driver. They wait for a high-target load to be assigned to them, then conveniently step away from the load, leaving it for the criminal organization to steal. The driver gets fired, and moves on to the next victim. This method depends on the carrier’s good name and clean background.
While I don’t expect to see an overwhelmingly high frequency of this method, I’ve had more and more people reach out to tell me they think it’s happened to them. That tells me it’s more common than we may realize, but isn’t yet being recognized, which means it isn’t reported correctly. This raises another problem in itself — cargo theft reporting in this country is deeply inconsistent and depends only on voluntary reporting to organizations like CargoNet. On top of the lack of mandating, incidents like fictitious pickups tend to get misclassified or go unreported entirely.
The underlying vulnerability is one the industry has been slow to address. Carrier vetting has gotten genuinely sophisticated over the past decade. Brokers and shippers have access to real tools — automated onboarding, authority monitoring, insurance verification — and those tools work for what they were designed to do. The problem is they were all designed to answer the same question: is this carrier legitimate? Until recently, nobody had built them to answer the question that matters at the dock: is this the right person picking up this load? Thankfully we are starting to see more resources becoming available that both vet the individual driver and verify their identity in connection with the carrier and equipment at the point of pickup.
While addressing this specific gap will help move the needle, there is no single solution that will turn the tides where cargo theft is concerned.
The record attendance at this year’s National Cargo Theft Summit — hosted by TAPA Americas in Atlanta — reflects something real about where the industry is. This topic has urgency in a way it hasn’t had before. Shippers, brokers, carriers, insurers, law enforcement — people are showing up because they’re feeling the impact and they’re looking for answers.
The answers exist, but they require the industry to continue dovetailing efforts, sharing information, and adopting a culture of security that makes cargo theft more difficult and costly. Each time we close a door, the bad actors are sure to find a window. The question is whether the industry will work together to shore up its defenses before the losses get worse.
