Cargo Theft Losses Doubled to $304M — Driver Impersonation Is Why

At first glance, the latest cargo theft numbers look like good news. Verisk's CargoNet network recorded 677 supply chain theft incidents across the U.S. and Canada in the second quarter of 2026 — down 26% from the same period last year.¹

Look at the dollar figure next to it, and the story changes. Estimated losses more than doubled year over year, reaching $304.6 million, up from $135.7 million in Q2 2025.¹ Fewer thefts. More than twice the money. That gap is the story: the theft that's easy and opportunistic is getting weeded out, while the theft that's harder to catch — identity-driven, targeted, high-value — is doing more damage per incident.

Fewer Hits, Bigger Targets

Cargo theft isn't becoming less of a threat. It's becoming more selective. Verisk attributes the surge in losses to a handful of high-value, highly targeted schemes — particularly thefts of copper, aluminum, and other industrial metals, along with enterprise-grade computer, networking, and cryptocurrency mining equipment.¹ These shipments move through the supply chain looking like ordinary freight, but they can carry a price tag in the millions — a serious mismatch between their value and the level of security protecting them.

As Keith Lewis, VP of operations at Verisk CargoNet, put it: "Lower incident volume should not be mistaken for lower risk."¹ The groups behind these losses aren't casting a wide net. They're doing their homework, identifying the loads worth the effort, and going after them specifically.

What Fell — and What Didn't

This new concentrated focus should certainly worry dock managers. But it should also concern shippers choosing carriers, brokers placing loads, and insurers underwriting them. After all, fewer thefts doesn't mean less at stake if one of them hits your freight.

It's also worth emphasizing that not every category of cargo theft declined at the same rate. Physical theft of unattended, loaded trailers and containers dropped sharply. So did non-delivery fraud, where criminals acquire an existing, reputable carrier's operating authority and book freight with no intention of delivering it — a decline especially pronounced in California and Texas.¹ Those are real wins, and they reflect genuine progress in physical security and carrier vetting.

But fictitious pickups — thieves impersonating a legitimate driver, using a fake ID, to walk out of a warehouse or distribution center with a fully loaded truck — barely moved. Verisk recorded 158 fictitious pickup incidents in Q2 2026, down only slightly from 165 a year earlier, even as theft-classified events overall fell from 488 to 378.¹ Business email compromise, which criminals use to access shipment details, impersonate trusted contacts, and redirect freight, also remained a steady presence in the quarter's most sophisticated schemes.¹

Put those two data points next to each other and a pattern emerges: the theft methods that are declining are the ones that depend on brute force or opportunity. The methods holding steady are the ones that depend on beating an identity check.

The Common Misconception: If It Looks Real, It Is Real

Fictitious pickups keep working for a simple reason: most dock checks are built to catch an ID that looks wrong, not one that's been engineered to look right. A counterfeit CDL that's been through a decent print shop can clear a glance-and-wave, and even a rudimentary barcode scan, without much trouble — which means the driver never had to be who their license said they were. They just had to look convincing enough, for long enough, to drive the load away from the dock.

We wrote about this shift last year, when cargo theft was already costing supply chains as much as $35 billion annually and the average trucking theft had climbed to $202,364 per incident.² The new CargoNet data confirms the underlying problem hasn't gone away — if anything, it's the one part of the theft landscape that's proving hardest to shrink.

The trucking-specific numbers already circulating make the scale of it clear: strategic freight fraud is up 1,500% since 2021, the average cargo theft incident now costs an estimated $274,000, and 75% of stolen cargo is never recovered.³ Each of those numbers depends on the same thing going wrong: nobody confirmed the driver's identity before the load left the dock.

Closing the Gap

A convincing fake ID and a genuine one can look identical to the naked eye and can even scan as valid with a basic barcode reader — that's the entire point of a good counterfeit. Catching the difference means checking something a counterfeiter can't see or reproduce.

Intellicheck verifies every CDL against the hidden, jurisdiction-specific security layer that state DMVs embed in every barcode — the part a counterfeiter can't replicate. It returns a decision in under a second, at a 99.975% decisioning rate, and runs on the scanning devices dock teams already use, so there's no new hardware and no workflow disruption. Legitimate drivers move through as fast as they do today, while counterfeit credentials get caught before the truck is loaded, not after the freight is gone. See how it works for trucking and logistics operations →

Cargo theft rings are getting more selective. The identity check at your dock should be too.

Footnotes

1. Verisk CargoNet, Q2 2026 Cargo Theft Analysis, August 2026
2. TruckingDive; Intellicheck, "Cargo Theft: Truck Driver Impersonation is Growing, and Costing Logistics and Trucking Companies Billions," 2025
3. American Trucking Associations, 2025; Patronscan Industry Analysis, May 2026; American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI), 2025

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