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This spring, just one week before Easter, thieves hijacked a truck carrying roughly 12 tons of KitKat chocolate. This loss is evidence that cargo theft is an escalating problem for business of all sizes. The KitKat story made headlines because of the brand and the punchline, but strip those away, and what’s left is the kind of incident that’s becoming far more common.
Read also: Reducing Cargo Theft and Operational Delays with Mobile Patrol Security
Cargo theft is no longer the work of opportunistic criminals targeting unsecured trailers or isolated warehouses. The thefts are coordinated, intelligence-led operations carried out by organised criminal groups that understand supply chains as well as the businesses that operate them.
While headlines tend to focus on the value of the goods that disappear, which is of course an important point to mention, what we should be focusing on is the point of failure which comes far sooner than when the goods are lifted from the ship or truck carrying them. Before a shipment is stolen, someone has successfully convinced a logistics company that they are somebody else.
ID fraud has become one of the most effective weapons in modern cargo theft. Criminals aren’t having to force their way into supply chains – it’s happening much more in plain sight where they gain legitimate access by impersonating carriers, drivers or employees using forged, stolen or synthetic identities. From more than 1 million ID verifications at North American logistics facilities since January 2024, 1.83% have been flagged as fraudulent and 1.79% had expired. When you add these figures together, that’s over 35,000 invalid ID verifications which is far from insignificant.
Read full post on Global Trade.
