The thief books the load

The load that disappears today was usually stolen days earlier, in an inbox. Somebody booked it under a name they did not own, using contact details that led back to nobody. A real truck showed up, real paperwork got signed, and the freight rolled away looking legitimate to everyone at the dock.

Theft moved upstream of the truck

Through the 2010s, cargo theft mostly meant straight theft: trailers pulled from truck stops and unsecured yards, locks cut, freight gone by morning. Verisk CargoNet, the industry's main theft-reporting network, puts what it calls strategic theft, deception rather than bolt cutters, at about 8% of cargo theft in 2020. By the end of 2024 it was about a third.

Scott Cornell of Travelers says cargo theft fundamentally changed between 2020 and 2022. Freight procurement moved fully online during the pandemic, and the crime followed it there.

Reported theft losses tripled in three years

Estimated total cargo-theft losses reported to CargoNet, US and Canada · Verisk CargoNet annual analyses

Incidents held flat. CargoNet logged 3,594 supply-chain crime events in 2025, about the same as the year before, while confirmed thefts rose 18%, estimated losses rose 60% and the average loss per theft jumped 36%, to $273,990. Bigger, better-chosen targets. "Criminal enterprises are becoming more selective and sophisticated," is how Keith Lewis, CargoNet's VP of operations, summarized the year, "targeting extremely high value shipments rather than relying on opportunistic theft."

Four plays on the same asset

The fictitious pickup. A fraudster answers a load posting as a legitimate carrier, from a lookalike email domain, with a throwaway internet phone number. The broker's checks come back clean, because the carrier being checked is real; it just is not who they are talking to. CargoNet counted fictitious pickups at roughly 66 per year across 2012 to 2022. In 2023 it counted 576.

The play that grew ninefold

Fictitious pickups reported to CargoNet, per year · Verisk CargoNet

The purchased authority. Some identities are not stolen at all; they are bought. Dormant carriers and retiring owner-operators sell their MC numbers openly, and the buyer inherits everything attached: the grant date, the clean inspection history, the years of on-time deliveries that vetting systems reward. Highway's fraud index for the first quarter of 2026 flagged 399 carrier ownership changes, up 169.6% year over year, and put sold MCs and ownership changes at roughly 20% of the fraud incidents it saw. The clean record is the product. A fleetfax analysis of the federal record found that new carriers sharing a phone plus an officer or address with a carrier FMCSA shut down for cause are 3.6 times as likely to already have a crash on record as all new carriers (9.1% vs 2.55%, carriers registered since January 2024, June 2026).

The stolen load usually exits through double brokering: re-posted to a load board and hauled by an unwitting, legitimate carrier while the middleman disappears with the freight or the payment. TIA's president told Congress in 2023 that the fraud epidemic was costing brokers, carriers, and shippers around $800 million.

The hijacked registration. The most direct version skips impersonation and takes over the government record itself. Phishing or social engineering yields a carrier's federal login or PIN; the fraudster then edits the carrier's contact information inside the registration system, so that a broker who diligently calls "the number on file" reaches the thief. FMCSA maintains a warning page describing exactly this scheme. NMFTA's 2026 cybersecurity report attributes the sharpest regional theft spikes of late 2025, up 110% in New Jersey and 33% in eastern Pennsylvania year over year, to organized groups that "impersonate carriers, hijack Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) accounts, and manipulate load tenders."

The calendar. Loaded trailers left sitting over a long weekend, short-staffed facilities, and thefts that may go unnoticed until business resumes give thieves a head start.

The holiday window, measured

Average cargo thefts per day around the July 4th holiday · Verisk CargoNet holiday advisories

Fourteen years of warnings

None of this ambushed the government. In 2012 the Government Accountability Office published a study titled "New Applicant Reviews Should Expand to Identify Freight Carriers Evading Detection" (GAO-12-364). It counted new registrants with "chameleon" attributes rising from 759 in 2005 to 1,136 in 2010, found that 18% of them went on to be involved in a severe crash versus 6% of other new applicants, and totaled the human cost of that six-year window at 217 deaths and 3,561 injuries. Its central recommendation was to extend FMCSA's identity-vetting program, then covering only passenger and household-goods carriers, to freight, "as soon as possible."

Freight carriers were 98% of new applicants in 2010, and FMCSA did not extend the vetting to all new applicants, freight included, until February 2016. Meanwhile the rest of the machinery built to close the gap kept failing quietly. The civil penalty for evading regulation started at $200, less than the $300 it cost to apply for authority in the first place. The Unified Registration System, finalized in 2013 partly to re-verify existing registrants, launched its first phase in 2015 and was suspended indefinitely for existing carriers in 2017. In 2019 an FMCSA enforcement ruling (In the Matter of Riojas) limited FMCSA's power to fine some commercial-rule violations itself; for those it now has to go through the courts. And when members of Congress asked DOT's Inspector General in 2023 to set up a fraud task force, the OIG stopped short of endorsing it.

The paper trail

Federal responses to carrier identity fraud, 2008–2026

1. 2008 Sherman, TX bus crash: 17 killed by a chameleon
2. 2012 GAO: extend vetting to freight "as soon as possible"
3. 2015 URS launches for new applicants
4. 2017 URS suspended for existing carriers
5. 2019 Riojas ruling limits FMCSA's fines
6. 2023 Congress asks OIG for a task force; no endorsement
7. 2025 ID checks required for new applicants
8. 2026 Motus extends ID checks to existing registrants

Crash or reversalFederal action

The front door closes in 2026. The side door stays open.

The response finally arrived in this cycle. FMCSA now requires identity proofing for new applicants: a government ID matched against a live facial scan. It was added to the registration process in 2025, before the Motus cutover, and carried into Motus, FMCSA's new registration system, which also verifies the business itself. In February 2026 a Senate bill aimed squarely at fictitious pickups, double brokering, and hostage loads was introduced, and in April the FBI issued a public advisory on cyber-enabled cargo theft. The early returns are real: the first quarter of 2026 brought the first year-over-year decline in cargo theft since 2021, reported by Overhaul.

The caveat sits in FMCSA's own description of the rollout: identity verification applies to new applicants automatically, while the roughly 800,000 existing registrants are verified "when users access the new system for the first time." An account nobody logs into keeps whatever identity it always had. And inside that improving quarter, deceptive pickup schemes still rose 31%. When the front door gets a guard, the value shifts to what is already inside: carriers with years of clean history, whose identities can be borrowed, bought, or taken over. Highway's index flagged 89.6% more identity alerts than a year earlier in the same quarter.

What is being stolen now is a carrier's history: a believable identity, years in the making, worth more per pound than most freight.

What the public record can and cannot see

The transaction layer of this fraud is invisible to public data: the load-board bid, the spoofed email thread, the delivery address that changes mid-route all live in private systems, and no federal dataset records a stolen load until long after it is gone.

What the public record does see is the identity layer every play has to touch. A "new" carrier that lines up with a for-cause-revoked predecessor. An authority granted, revoked, and reinstated inside a few months. An ownership or contact change on a carrier whose record was spotless precisely because someone else built it. The phone number and email a carrier actually filed with the government, against which the number in an email thread can be checked. These are the marks the schemes above leave in the federal record, and they are checkable by anyone, for free, before the truck is loaded.

The fleetfax carrier report shows the whole federal record on a carrier, with the identity patterns above surfaced as cautions for a human to weigh. The fraud has to touch the public record somewhere. The question is whether anyone looks.