Cargo theft used to be simple. Guys with guns hijacking trucks at rest stops. Crews breaking into warehouses at night. Cutting locks in parking lots. It was risky, it was violent, and you actually had to show up.

That's not how it's done anymore.

The most successful cargo thieves today don't carry weapons—they carry laptops. They're not wrestling drivers out of truck cabs at gunpoint. They're sitting in apartments, maybe overseas, browsing shipping contracts online and bidding on jobs like freelancers.

This is how $400,000 worth of lobster was stolen.

A few days before Christmas 2024, on December 12th, a refrigerated truck pulled up to a cold storage warehouse in Taunton, Massachusetts, whicch is one of the biggest cold storage networks in the country. The driver was there to pick up a shipment of processed lobster meat, destined for Costco stores in Illinois and Minnesota.

He had paperwork. A commercial driver's license. The truck had the right company name and logo on the side. Everything matched what the warehouse was expecting.

The workers checked the documentation. It all lined up. They loaded pallet after pallet of lobster meat into the refrigerated trailer. The driver signed off on the pickup, the truck pulled out of the lot, merged onto the highway and that was the last time anyone saw it.

To understand how this happened, you need to understand how freight moves in this country.

When a company needs to ship something like electronics, furniture, or lobster meat, they usually don't own the trucks themselves. They hire a freight broker. The broker's job is to be the middleman: find a trucking company, negotiate the rate, coordinate the pickup and delivery. They're the matchmaker between cargo and carrier.

Brokers find trucking companies through something called a load board. Think of it like a job marketplace for shipping. Brokers post available loads: here's the cargo, here's the destination, here's what it pays. Trucking companies browse listings, find jobs that fit their routes, and bid on the work. When a broker picks a carrier, they swap paperwork, confirm details over email, and the truck shows up to get the freight.

This process is efficient. It moves fast. The whole system runs on trust and documentation.

And that's where we see the vulnerability.

Because it all happens online. You're not meeting drivers beforehand. You're not visiting their terminal. You're looking at safety ratings on a government database, maybe exchanging a few emails. You're trusting that the company on the other end is who they say they are.

Most of the time, they are. But sometimes they're not.

The freight broker on the lobster job was a company called Rexing, based out of Indiana. They got hired to move the lobster from Taunton to the Midwest—a routine job they'd done hundreds of times. They posted the load on a board, and a trucking company responded. Good safety ratings. Proper licensing. Insurance looked good. All the boxes checked.

So Rexing hired them.

Except this trucking company didn't exist. Not really.

What the thieves did was find a real carrier—a legit trucking company with a clean record and a good reputation—and clone everything about them. They stole their identity. They copied the company name, the transportation number, the insurance information. They even registered a website with a domain that looked almost identical to the real company's. The only difference was a tiny accent mark over one letter. Impossible to catch unless you're examining it character by character.

They put the company's name and logo on a truck. They made a fake commercial driver's license for whoever was behind the wheel. Then they went shopping for high-value bids.

When they found the lobster job, they bid on it and won. When they showed up to the warehouse with a truck, a driver, and a stack of paperwork that all looked exactly right, the warehouse had no reason to question it. This is how freight gets picked up every single day across the country.

So the warehouse handed over the lobster. The truck drove away.

A few hours into the trip, the GPS tracker on the truck went dark. The driver had disabled it manually. When Rexing couldn't contact the driver and couldn't see the truck, they knew something was off. They called the police.

That's when they got the bad news: this wasn't the first time.

Ten days earlier, a different shipment had vanished from the same warehouse. Ironically, it was crab meat that went missing. Same setup: a carrier that looked legit on paper, showed up with the right credentials, loaded the freight, and disappeared.

Two hits on the same facility in less than two weeks.

But the lobster and crab weren't the only things to disappear in New England that month. Around Thanksgiving, up in Maine, someone stole about 14 cages full of oysters—40,000 of them. About $20,000 worth.

Three shipments within three weeks across 160 miles of New England coastline. Maybe a coincidence. Maybe not.

Seafood makes an attractive target for a reason. It's high value. It's high demand. And it's completely untraceable.

There are no serial numbers on a lobster tail. Once it leaves the warehouse, you can't prove where it came from. If someone shows up at a restaurant or distributor offering premium product at half the price, most buyers aren't going to ask a lot of questions. They're just going to buy.

That lobster meat probably hit restaurant tables in Boston or New York within a week of being stolen.

This is what freight crime looks like now. No masks. No guns. No squealing tires trying to get away from the cops. Just paperwork and patience.

Twenty years ago, shipping was built on relationships. Brokers knew their carriers. Drivers knew the warehouse guys. There was friction in the system created by phone calls, handshakes, and repeat business. That friction slowed things down, but it also created security. You knew who you were dealing with because you'd dealt with them before.

Now everything's digital. Load boards. Email threads. PDF attachments. You can book a truck to haul a load across the country without ever hearing a human voice on the other end.

A scammer can sit in another state or another country, go online, build a fake identity, and start booking loads. No one's visiting their office. Business happens by email.

This scam has a name in the industry: fictitious pickup.

It went from being 1% of all cargo thefts in 2022 to 17% by 2023. It's the fastest-growing category of freight crime in the country, and it's still climbing.

Cargo theft costs somewhere between $15 and $35 billion a year in the United States.

The industry is trying to catch up. There are carrier vetting services now, identity verification tools, better GPS systems that are harder to disable. Some companies are going back to old-school methods: calling the carrier directly, verifying phone numbers against official databases, making drivers check in at multiple points along the route.

But every time they patch one hole, the scammers find another. When you can steal a company's entire identity with a domain registration and some forged PDFs, the barrier to entry is low and the payoff is extremely high. And the odds of getting caught? Slim.

Somewhere out there, 40,000 oysters, a truckload of crab, and $400,000 worth of lobster meat have made their way through restaurants and the seafood black market across the Northeast. It's eaten. It's gone.

The people who pulled this off are probably already back online, browsing another load board, scanning for the next high-value shipment of scallops and shrimp—hoping the next broker who hires them won't look too closely at the email address.

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