The freight market tightened. So did the fraud.

The truck arrived on time. The driver had the pickup number, the appointment window and a rate confirmation that matched the broker's down to the reference codes. A dock crew at a Southern California warehouse loaded it with consumer electronics and sent it on its way. Nothing about the pickup looked wrong, because on paper nothing was. The motor carrier named on the paperwork was real, licensed and in good standing. It just wasn't the company that pulled up to the dock. By the time the broker put it together, days later, the trailer, the freight and the phone number on the rate con had all gone quiet.

Nobody cut a lock or jumped a fence. The theft ran on a borrowed identity and a load posted to a board, and a growing share of cargo theft now works exactly this way.

It's also why the crime wave can look like it's cooling and getting worse at once.

Counted one way, the wave is receding. Verisk CargoNet logged 767 supply chain crime events across the United States and Canada in the first quarter of 2026, down about 5% from a year earlier and down 12% from the previous quarter.

The losses didn't follow. Estimates for the same three months held near $132 million, about even with a year earlier, and confirmed cargo thefts rose by 41 events to 596. Across all of 2025 the average confirmed theft ran close to $274,000, up more than a third in 12 months, and full-year losses reached an estimated $725 million, a 60% jump over 2024 on confirmed counts that climbed 18% to 2,646. Whoever is running these schemes didn't retreat over the winter. They got more selective about what they hit, and better at hitting it.

The theft moved to the load board

For most of this crime's history, stealing freight meant physically taking it. Cut a trailer loose at a truck stop, or tail a high-value load off the lot. That still happens. The fastest-growing category, though, is what the industry files under strategic theft, and it barely resembles a break-in. Verisk CargoNet describes impersonation-based theft as having matured into a systematic, scalable method, and FMCSA, which registers the nation's carriers, now treats the problem as one of identity rather than padlocks.

The methods are familiar to anyone who books freight. In an identity theft, a criminal operates under another carrier's USDOT number or poses as a licensed broker. In a double-brokered load, the freight gets re-brokered to a carrier the first broker never approved and often never pays. Add fictitious pickups, phishing for load details, factoring fraud, rate manipulation and the occasional hostage load once the trailer is sealed. The modern thief doesn't break into the supply chain. He logs in.

A tight market is the accelerant

The fraud isn't incidental to the rate story every fleet manager is already watching. It's downstream of it. Truckload spot rates are at record highs, tender rejections are climbing and capacity is scarce, which is the environment where fraud pays best.

When loads are hard to cover, a broker staring at a failing route guide and an impatient shipper moves fast, and fast is where verification thins out. Freight brokers themselves say rising values and urgency are what let a good impostor through. The more a load is worth, the more it's worth stealing, and a scam built on speed does its best work when everyone else is in a hurry too.

Double brokering in particular behaves less like theft than like a trade. The operator captures the spread between what a shipper pays and what the freight costs to move, pockets the margin and never settles with the carrier that hauled it. The wider the spread, the better the trade. With spot rates sitting well above contract levels right now, the spread is unusually wide and the incentive to work it unusually strong.

There's a reading of all this that a forecaster should at least entertain: fraud as a coincident indicator. A surge moves with the same forces lifting tender rejections and spot rates, one more confirmation that the market really tightened. Hold it loosely, though. Incident counts fell even while the market ran hot this spring, so the information is in severity and sophistication, not raw volume.

The cleanup has a side effect

The same federal enforcement wave that's thinning carrier ranks and helping push rates to records is also churning the pool of operating authorities that impersonators draw from, which means the cleanup and the exposure are, for now, the same motion. Every revoked or dormant MC number is a potential costume.

Washington is at least answering the identity problem directly. On May 19 FMCSA launched Motus, a single registration platform built around biometric identity verification and fraud detection, replacing a patchwork of older systems; the agency said it acted on a documented rise in identity theft, hijacked accounts and fake registrations, some traced to foreign actors. Congress is moving too. A bill targeting double brokering and hostage loads is on the Senate floor, on top of civil penalties that already reach $16,000 per violation per day and criminal wire-fraud exposure for the worst offenders. The enforcement is real and getting sharper. It's also arriving after two record years.

Who eats the loss now

The most consequential shift is who pays. Physical theft mostly landed on shippers and their cargo insurers. Strategic theft lands on the broker and the factoring company that wired payment to an impostor, and on the real carrier left holding an unpaid invoice. The loss moved from the truck stop to the balance sheet.

That migration collides with a legal one. This spring's Supreme Court ruling left brokers newly exposed to negligent-selection liability for the carriers they hire, a shift we covered in "Who pays for trucking accidents now?". Put the two together and a broker can be defrauded on the payment and sued over the carrier it failed to vet, in the same transaction. Carrier vetting stops being back-office overhead and starts being priced risk, the kind an underwriter would recognize.

For anyone booking freight, the practical takeaway is to treat verification the way an underwriter treats a policy, with the most scrutiny reserved for high-value loads and for any deal where the urgency runs a little too convenient. The tight market compounds the exposure. When route guides break and freight spills into the spot market, as we described in "What to do when your freight bid stops working", it spills into the channel where impersonation lives.

The cost that never prints

Add it up and roughly $725 million a year, at nearly $274,000 a hit, is a cost that never prints on DAT or SONAR. It works like a surcharge on every load, and it concentrates on the operators with the least room to absorb it, the small carrier that eats one stolen load and the broker covering freight on thin margins. In a market this tight, the rate indices understate what it costs to move a truck.

Whether the incident count climbs back with the summer peak or the fewer-but-bigger pattern holds is now a question you can put a number on. Our Q3 cargo-theft market resolves on Verisk CargoNet's next quarterly count, and the consensus that forms there will double as a read on the freight market itself, because pricing the fraud means pricing the tightness.

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