In the last five years, there has been a 1,500% increase in cargo thefts in the United States that currently cost the US supply chain $35 billion a year, according to IMC Executive Vice President Peter Schneider.
Schneider was speaking to the Propeller Club of Northern California (PCNC) on September 8th in which he said: “$35 billion is what cargo theft is now attributed to in the supply chain every year …That's talking about insurance claims, that's talking about lost equipment and lost trucks and hospitalizations of drivers getting mugged and deaths … 1500% increase in cargo theft from Q1 of 2021 to Q1 of 2026. So, in five years.”
Schneider said the human cost to drivers who are the victims of cargo theft is huge:” The human cost is sometimes lives … but is (also) truck drivers being held at gunpoint, knife point, they're at truck stops, fuel stops, you know, they're at a stoplight and somebody puts a knife on them, and it's in the middle of the night, there's no traffic around and they are … held at gunpoint or knife point … and somebody … starts stealing cargo. And in 30 seconds you can steal a lot of iPads …”
He added that the crimes don’t just impact trucking companies, “it's everybody in the supply chain, railroads, terminals, steamship lines.”
Location-wise, the thefts are most prominent in border states such as California and Texas but also in Midwestern cities such as Chicago and Memphis: “So … our lovely state of California leads the nation, of course, in incidents in cargo theft. Texas is number two. Anybody's guess as to why? The border. Border, right … Why would Tennessee and Illinois be three and four? Rail hubs. Memphis is a huge rail hub. Chicago's another rail hub. California, especially in Southern California, massive rail hubs there, right? Trains, trains and trains going in and out of the ports …good thing is consumer electronics is going down, but a bad thing is enterprise hardware, data center stuff, that's booming ...”
Schneider says IMC and other industry partners are supporting an enhanced federal role to fight cargo theft with passage of the CORCA bill.
In May, California Congressman David Valadao, who helped introduce the legislation, hailed the US House of Representatives passage of H.R. 2853, the Combating Organized Retail Crime (CORCA) ACT. The bill has bipartisan support, and Valadao says it “takes important steps to strengthen legal tools for law enforcement and crack down on interstate and transnational crime.”
Provisions of the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act would:
- Strengthen legal tools for law enforcement by allowing criminal forfeitures for interstate shipment, transportation of stolen goods, or sale of stolen goods convictions
- Expand money laundering statutes
- Enable prosecution of organized retail and supply chain groups using interstate or foreign commerce to facilitate crimes
- Mandate the creation of the Organized Retail and Supply Chain Crime Coordination Center within Homeland Security Investigations (HIS) and the Department of Homeland Security
Schneider says an effective response to cargo theft has been undermined by a lack of federal jurisdictional clarity. He hopes CORCA will change this.
One example of how thieves manipulate the system is applying for numerous US Department of Transportation (DOT) numbers: “Signal Hill, which is next to Long Beach … had 891 DOT numbers associated with one address. … It was a little shack, but it had an address. And they nailed them- I want to say it was earlier this year- 891 DOT numbers to this one address. And there were 20, 30 companies for 890 DOT numbers. One company had 190. One guy … had 190. So, what they do as a broker is they broker freight, they do some legal stuff, they do it the right way, and then they finally get a load that they want that they can turn around and make a lot of money, and they do that, and then they go away. And then the next day they open up another company under one of those new DOT numbers that they got.”
A major target of thieves is the US railroad system. Schneider said the majority of thefts occur by stealing from freight trains: “I don't know if it's 90 % … but there's … a lot of stuff that's not reported in this, in the same category whether it's strategic or opportunistic. States and local jurisdictions … don't classify certain cargo theft as cargo theft … they'll classify it as a nuisance call or something like that. Even though there may be cargo theft, actually stolen or trespassing. And so that's part of what the CORCA Bill (will do) … aligning some of the language, some of the wording so that each state follows the same rules and wording. However, it is true that most of the cargo theft incidents occur on the railroad…Yes. 100%. Most absolutely.”
One of the reasons trains are vulnerable is that “trains have gotten longer over the last 20, 25 years. They used to be 40, 50 cars. Now they're 80, 100 cars stacked. So that's a couple hundred containers in a train. Two, two and a half miles long. The trains used to be a mile, a mile and a half long. I mean, like less than a mile when I started in the industry in the 80s … So that coincides … really boomed during the Pandemic … when the pandemic happened, people were out of work, people weren't doing anything, people were sitting at home, and (some) were tired of twiddling their thumbs and some people said: ‘Let’s just start stealing stuff,” I guess … So that's really when it started to boom in 2020 … 2021. And with the opportunity of, wow, look at all these trains sitting here stopped” because of COVID related traffic congestion both at ports and at railyards around the United States unattended and vulnerable to break ins.
Once the train-stealing spree started, it never stopped, Schneider said.
