A record year for stealing freight
According to Verisk CargoNet, estimated cargo theft losses reached roughly $725 million in 2025, up about 60% from 2024. What's striking is that the number of incidents barely moved: CargoNet logged 3,594 supply chain crime events in 2025, essentially flat against 3,607 the year before. The losses surged not because thieves struck more often, but because they got far more selective, going after high-value loads instead of whatever happened to be sitting in a lot.
Confirmed cargo thefts specifically rose 18% year over year, from 2,243 to 2,646. Fewer random grabs, more deliberate, high-payoff operations. This is organized crime treating freight like a business, and it changes what protecting a shipment actually requires.
The numbers behind the surge
The headline figure is the average value per theft, which climbed to $273,990 in 2025, up 36% from $202,364 the year before. When a single successful hit is worth more than a quarter of a million dollars, criminals can afford to invest in patience, research and convincing paperwork.
$273,990 per theft, on average
That's the average loss on a single 2025 cargo theft, up 36% in a year. Broader industry estimates run much higher when you count downstream costs: the American Transportation Research Institute pegs the annual cost to the industry at as much as $6.6 billion, and some government-linked estimates put total losses higher still. However you measure it, the trend line points the same way, up.
How cargo actually gets stolen now
There are a handful of distinct methods, and they sit on a spectrum from crude to sophisticated:
- Straight theft. The classic version: a thief takes an unattended trailer or container from a truck stop, rest area or unsecured yard. Still common, especially over long weekends when loads sit idle.
- Pilferage. Partial theft, where only some of the cargo is taken from a container or trailer. Easy to miss until the shipment is counted at delivery.
- Strategic theft, or theft by deception. Fraudsters use stolen or fabricated identities to pose as legitimate carriers or brokers and get the freight handed to them through normal channels. No lock is cut, because the cargo is given away.
- Fictitious pickup. A specific strategic method where a thief uses a real, trusted carrier's identity to collect a load they were never assigned. By the time the real carrier arrives, the freight is gone.
- Double brokering fraud. A load is illegitimately re-brokered to an unvetted party, blurring the chain of custody and making the shipment easy to divert.
Strategic theft: the fastest-growing kind
The methods that worry investigators most in 2026 are the deception-based ones. Rather than breaking in, criminal groups exploit the trust built into the freight system. They set up shell carrier identities, hijack the credentials of legitimate ones, and target shipments already tendered to real carriers, sidestepping the compliance checks that traditionally focus on the tendering stage. CargoNet's analysts expect this misdirection of legitimately tendered freight to keep rising.
The uncomfortable part is that a deception theft can look completely normal right up until the cargo never arrives. The paperwork checks out. The pickup happens on schedule. The only signal that something is wrong is the shipment going somewhere it shouldn't, which is exactly the kind of anomaly you can only catch if you're watching the shipment in real time.
What thieves are targeting
Theft follows resale value, and 2025 showed clear shifts in what's being hit:
- Food and beverage saw the biggest jump, with 708 thefts, up 47%. Meat, seafood and tree nuts were particularly targeted, partly because they're hard to trace once resold.
- Metals rose 77%, driven heavily by demand for copper.
- Electronics, appliances and high-value consumer goods remain perennial targets thanks to easy resale.
- High-risk lanes and hotspots concentrate the losses, so the same shipment can carry very different risk depending on the route and where it sits idle.
Why visibility is your cheapest defense
Real-time tracking won't stop a determined criminal from taking a load. What it does is shrink the gap between the theft happening and you finding out, and in cargo recovery, that gap is everything. Stolen freight is most recoverable in the first hours. Once a container or trailer disappears into a network of yards and resale channels, the odds fall fast.
- Alerts on unexpected movement. If a container is released or moved without matching your plan, a real-time exception is the first sign something is off.
- Confirmed gate-out and pickup milestones. Knowing exactly when and where a container left the terminal gives you a factual timeline instead of a guess.
- A documented chain of custody. Milestone records are exactly what insurers and recovery teams need, and a clean timeline speeds up a claim.
- One view across carriers. Theft doesn't care which carrier you booked. Watching every shipment in one place means no blind spots between systems.
Practical steps to protect a shipment
Visibility is one layer. A few operational habits close the more common gaps:
- Vet carriers and brokers before tendering, and watch for double-brokering red flags like sudden changes to pickup details or payment terms.
- Verify identity at pickup. Confirm the driver and carrier against the booked assignment rather than trusting paperwork alone, since fictitious pickups rely on paperwork looking right.
- Avoid leaving loaded units idle, especially over weekends and holidays when strategic thieves know cargo sits unattended.
- Treat high-risk lanes differently. Add tracking, secure parking and tighter check-ins on routes and commodities known to be targeted.
- Keep sensitive load details off public channels. The less a thief knows about what's inside and where it's going, the harder it is to target.
The window between theft and discovery
Cargo theft in 2026 is quieter, smarter and more expensive than the smash-and-grab version most people picture. You can't lock every door, but you can make sure that when a shipment moves in a way it shouldn't, you're the first to know rather than the last. The faster you spot the anomaly, the more you can do about it, from alerting recovery teams to freezing a payment. Visibility is not a guarantee against theft. It's the difference between finding out in an hour and finding out at the delivery dock.