Cargo Theft Is Surging. Here’s Why Your Choice of Carrier Has Never Mattered More.

Freight crime isn’t a niche concern for shippers anymore. It’s a mainstream business risk — one that’s growing faster, getting more sophisticated, and costing more per incident than at any point in recorded history. The data makes a compelling case for paying closer attention to who’s moving your freight.

The Numbers Are Hard to Ignore

In 2024, cargo theft incidents across North America reached 3,625 — a 27% jump from the year before — with total estimated losses of nearly $455 million and an average loss per incident of $202,364. That was already a record.

Then 2025 happened. According to Verisk CargoNet, estimated losses surged another 60% to nearly $725 million, even as incident volume held relatively steady. What changed? Criminals got more selective. The average theft value climbed to $273,990 — a 36% increase in a single year — as organized groups shifted their focus almost entirely to high-value freight. When the numbers go up that sharply without a proportional rise in incidents, it tells you something important: these are no longer crimes of opportunity. They’re crimes of strategy.

Theft Has Evolved. The Crowbar Is Optional.

The image of a shadowy figure breaking into a trailer at a rest stop is increasingly outdated. Today’s cargo thieves are just as likely to be sitting behind a laptop.

Strategic cargo theft — which involves using deception, fraud, and stolen identities to walk away with a full truckload without ever breaking a lock — has grown by approximately 1,500% since 2022. Fictitious pickups, where criminals obtain advance intelligence about scheduled shipments and arrive with forged paperwork and cloned carrier vehicles to collect freight before the legitimate carrier shows up, skyrocketed from an average of 66 incidents per year between 2012 and 2022 to 576 events in 2023 alone. Deceptive pickup incidents rose another 57% in 2024.

Double-brokering scams, where criminals insert themselves into the brokerage chain to redirect loads to phantom carriers, are estimated to account for $500–700 million in freight loss annually. In some cases, thieves are using AI-altered bills of lading and malware delivered via phishing emails to harvest dispatch credentials — all before a single wheel turns.

The takeaway for shippers: the threat isn’t just at the loading dock. It’s in your inbox, on the load board, and throughout the supply chain.

A North American Issue

Cargo theft is not confined to any one country. Across North America, incidents have risen sharply in recent years, driven by increasingly organized and sophisticated criminal networks targeting high-value freight. In Canada, Ontario represents a significant concentration of reported activity, with the Greater Toronto Area ranking among the top cargo theft hotspots on the continent. Since 2019, more than $531 million in cargo and equipment has been reported stolen in Canada alone. Similar patterns are evident across the United States, where industry estimates suggest cargo theft losses exceed $15–$30 billion annually. In both markets, theft methods continue to evolve, with criminals leveraging strategic targeting, identity fraud, and supply chain vulnerabilities to execute increasingly complex schemes.

What This Means for Shippers

Lost freight is the obvious headline, but the downstream consequences compound quickly: supply chain disruptions, customer trust erosion, insurance complications, and the operational cost of investigating and recovering from a theft that, statistically speaking, results in goods that are rarely recovered. Food and beverage theft spiked 47% in 2025. Metal theft rose 77%. Enterprise computing hardware and pharmaceutical shipments have become prime targets for organized criminal rings operating across multiple countries simultaneously.

Cargo theft, as one industry researcher put it, has become a standard cost of doing business — and consumers ultimately foot the bill. The question for every shipper is which costs they’re willing to accept, and which ones a better choice of carrier can eliminate entirely.

Why Carrier Selection Is a Security Decision

Certifications like C-TPAT (Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism) and PIP (Partners in Protection) exist for exactly this reason. They’re not rubber stamps — they represent independently verified security protocols across the supply chain, from driver screening and physical security standards to cargo handling procedures and access controls. Carriers that hold both designations, as Bison Transport does, are recognized by customs authorities on both sides of the border as lower-risk partners.

But certifications tell only part of the story. The most honest measure of a carrier’s cargo safety record is its claims ratio — the percentage of shipments that result in a damage or loss claim. Bison Transport’s claims ratio is 0.1%, the lowest in the North American trucking industry. That number encompasses all claims, including cargo theft. It means that of every 1,000 shipments Bison handles, 999 arrive without incident. That’s not a marketing claim. It’s a verifiable metric that reflects years of consistent operational discipline across hundreds of thousands of annual loads.

How Carriers Operationalize Security

Certifications and metrics tell you what a carrier has achieved. How they sustain it is a different question.

One telling indicator is whether a carrier has embedded security awareness into daily operations at the ground level — not just in the control room. Bison Transport’s Neighbourhood Watch program is an example of this. Through a confidential internal reporting system, employees and contractors flag suspicious activity involving company equipment, freight, or property: unfamiliar vehicles following trucks through secured yard gates, unauthorized unloading activity, breached seals, unsecured load and route information, or any behaviour inconsistent with standard operations. Reports can also cover willful equipment damage or suspected theft of company, customer, or employee property.

Every report is investigated, and the identity of the person reporting is kept confidential. Bison offers rewards of up to $5,000 where information leads to a conviction or a meaningful improvement in security practice — a signal that the program is meant to generate real outcomes, not just awareness.

The logic behind programs like this aligns with how security researchers describe the cargo theft problem: the most effective deterrent isn’t any single technology or protocol, it’s making any given load or facility a harder and higher-risk target than the next one down the road.

The Bottom Line

Cargo theft is no longer a background risk that carriers and shippers can afford to manage reactively. It’s a fast-moving, high-value criminal enterprise that is becoming more organized and more profitable every year. The shippers best positioned to weather it aren’t necessarily the ones with the lowest rates — they’re the ones whose carriers have built the systems, culture, and track record to make their freight a hard target.

A 0.1% claims ratio. CTPAT and PIP certified. An industry-leading internal security culture. Bison Transport has spent decades building the kind of operation that cargo thieves find unattractive. That’s not an accident.