Cargo Theft Losses Rose 60% in 2025 but Theft Volume Didn’t (2026)

Figures: Verisk CargoNet, 2025 supply chain risk analysis.

Most coverage of these numbers has compressed them into one headline: cargo theft is up 60%. That is not what the data says, and the difference is the whole story. Theft volume was flat. Theft losses surged. Criminals ran roughly the same number of operations and took far more money out of each one, which changes what a brokerage should actually do about it.

What the 2025 numbers actually say

Four figures, side by side, in the order that makes them make sense.

All four are Verisk CargoNet’s published figures for the US and Canada. The 60% is arithmetically consistent with the two rows above it: 18% more incidents at 36% more value each is a 60% larger loss, and 2,646 incidents at $273,990 comes to $725 million.

Read the table top to bottom and the shape is clear. The number of times criminals came after the supply chain did not grow. The share of those events that ended in a confirmed theft did rise, from 62% of events in 2024 to 74% in 2025, and the value of what they took grew faster still. This was a year of better aim, not more shots.

Why the losses grew when the volume didn’t

Verisk CargoNet says so directly, and it is worth reading the sentence rather than the headline:

“Criminal enterprises are becoming more selective and sophisticated, targeting extremely high value shipments rather than relying on opportunistic theft.”

Keith Lewis, Vice President of Operations, Verisk CargoNet

Selection is the skill that got better. A crew that steals whatever is parked in the yard is limited by luck. A crew that reads a load board, a manifest and a lane, and picks the one trailer worth a quarter of a million dollars, is limited only by how well you verify who is picking up your freight. That is why the same number of attempts produced a far larger bill.

It also explains where the growth landed. Food and beverage was the most-hit commodity group with 708 thefts, a 47% jump on 2024, with meat, seafood and tree nuts singled out. Metal theft rose 77%, driven by demand for copper. And thieves moved into enterprise computer components and cryptocurrency mining hardware, categories chosen for resale value, not for being easy to reach.

Where it happened

California remained the most affected state by a wide margin, with 1,218 incidents. The sharpest increases were elsewhere: New Jersey up 50%, Indiana up 30%, Pennsylvania up 24%. Regional targeting followed the commodity mix: meat and seafood in the Northeast, especially New Jersey; tree nuts on the West Coast.

Inside California the activity shifted rather than shrank. Los Angeles County fell 11% while historically lower-risk regions climbed hard: Kern County up 82%, San Joaquin County up 44%. If your risk model is a list of hot ZIP codes you wrote two years ago, that movement is the part to take seriously. The map is not stable, and a lane that was quiet last year is not evidence that it is quiet now.

The methods behind the numbers

Four repeatable methods account for most of what brokers ran into in 2025. They overlap, they get combined, and they exploit the same weak point: the gap between booking a load and confirming it arrived.

1. The deceptive pickup. A thief poses as the assigned carrier, arrives at the shipper with a clean-looking truck and a matching load number, and drives off with real freight. The shipper releases it because everything checks out on the dock. The carrier you actually booked arrives hours later to an empty appointment, and you are the one explaining where the goods went. CargoNet expects deception groups to lean further into this in the year ahead.
2. Misdirecting a legitimately tendered shipment. The load is tendered to a real carrier, then paperwork or dispatch instructions send it somewhere you never authorised. The driver follows documents that look official, delivers to the wrong location, and the cargo is gone before anyone reconciles the discrepancy. Because nothing looks wrong at any single checkpoint, the diversion can run an entire transit before it surfaces.
3. Carrier identity theft on load boards. A criminal spoofs or steals a legitimate carrier’s MC number, insurance certificate and contact details, then books your load under that trusted name. You vetted a real, clean carrier; the truck that shows up belongs to someone else. Both double brokering and outright theft flow from this one move, and it scales because a single operator can rotate through many stolen identities.
4. Targeted commodity selection. This is the 2025 change, and it sits on top of the other three. Rather than taking whatever is available, crews pick the shipment: high-value food and beverage, copper and other metals, enterprise hardware. It is the difference between a $200,000 average loss and a $274,000 one, and it means a brokerage’s highest-value lanes now carry disproportionate risk rather than proportionate risk.

Why the broker absorbs it

Here is the part that does not get said plainly enough. When freight is stolen through any of these methods, the broker takes the consequences. The shipper trusted you to move their goods. The carrier you thought you booked never touched the freight. The claim, the chargeback, the lost account and the awkward phone call all route back to your desk.

At an average of $273,990 per incident, one successful theft can erase the margin on a great many clean loads. And because these thefts hide inside normal-looking transactions, a brokerage can be hit more than once before the pattern is visible. As we covered in our breakdown of how cargo theft starts with lost visibility, the loss rarely begins at the moment the freight disappears. It begins earlier, at the moment you stop being able to see where the load actually is.

What actually reduces your exposure

You cannot stop a fraudster from trying. You can make your freight a harder target and shorten the window in which a theft succeeds. Five operational habits do most of the work.

• Verify the driver and truck before the load moves. Confirm that the person and the equipment at pickup match the carrier you booked. A name on a dispatch sheet is not verification. Cross-check driver, truck number and trailer against your booking record.
• Confirm phone numbers independently. Do not call the number on the inbound email or the load board listing. Look the carrier’s number up from a source you trust and call that. Spoofed contact details are the heart of carrier identity theft.
• Give your highest-value lanes their own rules. Selective thieves pick by value, so your controls should sort by value too. Tighter vetting, a second verification step and closer monitoring on the loads worth stealing is a better use of effort than treating every load the same.
• Alert on route deviation, not on delivery failure. A load drifting off its expected lane is one of the earliest signals available to you. An automated deviation alert buys hours; discovering the problem at the delivery appointment buys nothing.
• Document everything at pickup. Photographs of the truck, trailer, seal, driver ID and paperwork create a verification trail that deters fraud and supports any claim or recovery later.

These habits matter, and they share one dependency. Verification at pickup tells you the load started right. It tells you nothing about the next 600 miles. For a deeper operational walkthrough, see our practical guide to load tracking for freight brokers.

Where visibility fits

Every one of the four methods depends on the same blind spot: the stretch of time between handing freight to a driver and confirming it arrived. Deceptive pickups, misdirected shipments, hijacked identities and value-targeted theft all rely on you not seeing where the load really is until it is too late to act.

Continuous location data does not make you harder to lie to at the dock. It makes the lie short-lived. A load that stops moving in the wrong place or slips off its lane becomes an alert instead of a surprise, you call the shipper before the shipper calls you, and recovery teams get a live location rather than a cold trail. Against thieves who are picking your most valuable freight on purpose, shortening the window is the lever you actually control.

That is what LBoard is for. If your defence against the 2025 numbers still rests on paperwork looking correct and a phone call sounding legitimate, you are watching the front door while the freight leaves out the back. Try LBoard to put real-time visibility on every load and catch deviations the moment they happen.

Frequently asked questions

How much did cargo theft cost in 2025?

Verisk CargoNet estimates losses of nearly $725 million across the United States and Canada in 2025, a 60% increase on 2024. The average value taken per theft was $273,990, up 36% from $202,364.

Did the number of cargo thefts actually increase in 2025?

Not the way the headline suggests. Supply chain crime events were essentially flat: 3,594 in 2025 against 3,607 in 2024. Confirmed cargo theft incidents rose 18%, from 2,243 to 2,646. The 60% figure describes losses, not volume, and most of that growth came from higher value per theft rather than more thefts.

What is strategic cargo theft?

Strategic cargo theft is theft carried out through deception rather than force: the thief poses as a legitimate carrier, or spoofs one, and the freight is handed over willingly at pickup. Nothing is broken into, so there is no alarm, no cut fence and no immediate sign that anything went wrong.

Which states had the most cargo theft in 2025?

California was the most affected state with 1,218 incidents. The largest year-on-year increases were in New Jersey (up 50%), Indiana (up 30%) and Pennsylvania (up 24%). Within California, activity moved away from Los Angeles County (down 11%) toward Kern County (up 82%) and San Joaquin County (up 44%).

What freight was targeted most in 2025?

Food and beverage, with 708 thefts, a 47% increase, with meat, seafood and tree nuts particularly affected. Metal theft rose 77%, driven by copper demand, and criminals also moved into enterprise computer components and cryptocurrency mining hardware.