Imagine you arrive at a facility to pick up a load and, checking in with personnel at the gate, the man in the guard shack looks confused, checks and double-checks his list of impending arrivals, only to tell you you’ve already been there. The load is gone.
It’s a situation that’s become more and more common over the years since the so-called “fictitious pickup” cargo theft mode drew enough attention in supply-chain-security circles to warrant specific attention. According to a white paper issued in 2013 by the CargoNet firm, it began to “emerge as a trend around 2005,” growing to account for a significant share of all thefts reported to CargoNet in 2011, with many thefts occurring in California. By 2012, such thefts, sometimes involving thieves’ fraudulent assumption of an existing carrier’s identity, accounted for 8 percent of all thefts reported to CargoNet.
Scott Cornell, 2VP of Transportation and Crime and Theft Specialist at Travelers Insurance, who for years headed the insurance company’s Special Investigations Group devoted to cargo theft, says that straight theft — thieves hitch to a loaded trailer, unload a trailer or otherwise drive away with a full tractor-trailer — remains the most common sort of cargo theft. But these “strategic” thefts, his terminology for the broad category CargoNet IDs as “fictitious pickup,” represent the “fastest-growing method of cargo theft,” Cornell says, accounting today for about 10 percent of thefts nationwide. Most of such thefts are coming from thieves operating in Illinois and Southern California, Cornell adds.
Since the thefts nearly always have a virtual component, thieves can “can target something no matter where it is,” Cornell says. “Part of the difference” — and the attraction for thieves, no doubt — “is that you can be very selective. You can pick out what you want to target rather than randomly picking out a trailer.”
As the CargoNet white paper illustrates, this relatively new kind of theft is taking advantage of the rise of web-based brokering and the sometimes tenuous nature of broker-carrier relationships on the spot market. “Fictitious pickups have grown alongside the expansion of web-based brokering,” according to the CargoNet report, “the ability to set up fictitious companies and websites, and the availability of high-quality fraudulent driver’s licenses. The just in time (JIT) supply chain management practices have exacerbated the problem by putting a premium on speed at the expense of performing time-consuming due diligence in vetting” carriers by brokers, and company employees by carriers, in some instances.
“Computer-savvy criminals (often former employees of trucking and logistics companies),” the report goes on to predict, “will increasingly turn to this modus operandi because it is less risky than traditional cargo theft.”
