Last year cargo thieves in the US and Canada ran about the same number of jobs as the year before. Verisk CargoNet logged 3,594 supply chain crime events in 2025 against 3,607 in 2024. Flat.
Losses rose 60%, to an estimated $725 million.
The average theft went from $202,364 to $273,990 — 36% more taken per incident on the same volume of crime. That is not an enforcement story. That is a targeting story. Somebody is choosing better loads.
Almost none of it will appear in your shrink number.
This edition is about the loss that happens before the goods arrive, and why the metric you report to your CFO was built to miss it.
The crime moved from the lock to the paperwork
The old model was a trailer taken from a truck stop. The current model is a signature.
30% of US cargo theft incidents in 2025 were strategic or fraud-driven — fictitious carriers, cloned MC numbers, double-brokering, identity theft of legitimate freight companies (Munich Re Specialty and BSI, June 2026).
Deceptive pickup schemes rose 31% year over year in Q1 2026, with nearly half of them in California (Overhaul, May 2026).
In June, the Manhattan District Attorney indicted eight men who allegedly did exactly this. They leased tractors, affixed a real carrier's name and registration number, presented fraudulent shipment paperwork, and drove the freight away. Six thefts between October 2025 and April 2026: $3.3 million in cigarettes, $432,000 in cheese, $295,000 in beef, $266,000 in copper, $165,000 in lamb.
Nobody cut a seal. Somebody signed for the load.
The insider version is just as clean. In July, twelve people were indicted in Memphis over at least $2 million in Nike product taken from the company's North American Logistics Center. The alleged method: find the product you want to resell inside the warehouse, and put a shipping label on it addressed somewhere you control. The building's own outbound process does the stealing.
Why your shrink number cannot see it
This is the part that should concern anyone who reports loss to a CFO.
NRF's own asset protection lead has written it plainly. David Johnston, August 2025: "Supply chain theft may be recorded in the cost of goods sold, occurring before items are officially accepted into inventory." And: "relying solely on shrink percentage can result in underreporting the true impact of theft and organized retail crime."
57% of retailers do not include supply chain loss or theft in their shrink calculation at all (NRF National Retail Security Survey, most recent edition).
Run the mechanics. Freight is stolen before the DC receives it. The goods never enter the inventory system, so there is no book-to-physical variance to find. The cost lands in COGS or gets absorbed by a carrier claim. Your shrink percentage is unchanged, your gross margin is worse, and nobody in your function is asked why.
Six in ten of us are running a loss metric that is structurally blind to a category that grew 60% last year.
A perspective from the field
I have never met an LP leader who was told at hiring that freight was out of scope. It simply was. The four walls were the job, and everything upstream belonged to supply chain. That division of labor made sense when theft meant a person in an aisle.
It stopped making sense the moment the most profitable way to steal from a retailer became registering as its carrier. If you do not own the loss, you will not be asked to fix it — but you will be in the room when someone asks why gross margin moved. The scope was drawn around what was easy to count, and we have been defending that line ever since.
The lawmakers merged the categories before we did
Watch where legislation is going, because it is ahead of the org chart.
The Combating Organized Retail Crime Act passed the US House on May 12, 2026 with 348 votes. Read the name of the body it creates: the Organized Retail and Supply Chain Crime Coordination Center. Congress put supply chain in the title of the retail crime center.
Tennessee (Public Chapter 871, effective July 1, 2026) defined fraudulent freight theft and now requires police agencies to document and investigate every cargo theft report as a criminal case, regardless of jurisdiction — a direct attack on the underreporting that keeps this loss invisible.
Arizona (SB1452, signed June 23, 2026) created a statewide cargo theft task force in the Attorney General's office with six dedicated investigators.
California's version, SB1019, is sitting on the Senate Appropriations suspense file, which in Sacramento usually means dead. California accounted for 1,218 CargoNet incidents in 2025 — more than any other state.
Three practical moves for the next 90 days
Ask finance one question in writing: where does in-transit loss land in our P&L, and who reviews it? If the answer takes more than a week to produce, you have found the gap. Bring the answer to your next business review before someone else does.
Get read access to carrier claims. Not ownership, not headcount — visibility. You cannot investigate a pattern you never see, and claims data is where the pattern lives.
Treat carrier onboarding as a vetting problem. Fraudulent carrier registration is now the dominant method. That is due diligence, and due diligence is far closer to your skill set than to procurement's. Ask who verifies a new carrier's identity today, and what evidence they require.
Closing note
The categories this industry uses to sort loss were drawn decades ago, when stealing from a retailer meant walking into one.
Criminals reorganized around the new opportunity years ago. Congress is reorganizing now. The measurement is the last thing left, and it is the piece we control.
If in-transit loss sits inside your shrink number, I want to know how you got it there — that is rarer than it should be. Reply with anything you can share, anonymized always.
Forward this to one LP or AP leader who should be reading it.
— Gabriel
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