Odd Lots · Thursday, August 13, 2026
A dramatic surge in cargo theft, with incidents up 60% last year, is plaguing the supply chain. Organized crime rings are increasingly targeting high-value goods, including liquor brands and electronics destined for data centers, leading to substantial losses and increased scrutiny from freight brokers.
“Cargo theft has been through the roof since COVID, and there's been a kind of a huge amount of criminal element, like large criminal elements that have come in and are doing everything from spoofing carriers pretending to be carriers, to setting up fraudulent entities, acting like a normal carrier for a while, then figuring out where the good freight is, stealing that and then disappearing.”
“And that's exploded in the last couple of years. And so as a result of that, freight brokers have been much more scrutinous of who they're hiring.”
“The components of the data centers are obviously incredibly expensive. You're talking turbines, you're talking obviously GPUs and all that super super expensive and naturally targets for theft.”