Heists and Hijackings: How rampant cargo theft is costing America’s supply chain billions

(InvestigateTV) — It’s just before 8:00 a.m. on a June morning in Memphis.

A surveillance camera is rolling as two cars pull up to a tractor-trailer parked near a Nike distribution center, its driver waiting to drop the load that’s been hauled overnight.

Two men approach the semi, armed with a cutting grinder and a mission to steal the cargo within the trailer. As a third man plays lookout, Memphis police say the pair begin unloading boxes.

When the truck driver realizes what’s happening, the video shows him confronting the thieves, who promptly punch him square in the face before going right back to looting the trailer.

This Memphis incident is the kind of brazen theft that’s been plaguing commercial trucking across the country at an accelerating pace, costing the industry $35 billion annually, according to Chris Spear, CEO of the American Trucking Associations.

“What we’re seeing just in the last three years is a 1,500% increase in the criminal activity that surrounds our industry,” he said. “Criminal activity like this has no place in the supply chain, and we have a responsibility to combat it.”

However, experts say there’s an opportunity to fight back that’s being missed at the federal level — a shortcoming that leaves not just trucking but also commercial rail vulnerable to cargo theft.

InvestigateTV discovered a lack of national coordination of cargo theft cases, with many prosecuted as one-offs at the local or state level and sometimes dismissed simply as an insurance matter.

Tracking cargo thefts at the federal level is also limited, despite that the crime threatens workers, can cause increases in prices for consumers and often funnels big money into other criminal enterprises, including human trafficking and drugs.

“I think a lack of coordinated, consistent and centralized data is absolutely contributing to identifying what is a much larger issue across the entire supply chain,” said Ian Jefferies, CEO of the Association of American Railroads.

An increasingly violent issue

Rail has also been hit exceptionally hard by cargo theft, with Jefferies pointing to a 40% spike in 2024.

“It is an economic issue. It is a supply chain issue. But this is a human issue, too,” Jefferies said.

It’s an issue that has become increasingly violent. InvestigateTV and Phoenix affiliate, Arizona’s Family, obtained video, photographs, incident reports, body camera footage, evidence files and case records from cargo theft incidents across the country.

Among the incidents with evidence examined by InvestigateTV:

• A July 2024 theft of thousands of dollars’ worth of Beats earbuds and the truck hauling them. The driver was inside a truck shop at the time, taking a shower, when the thieves rolled off with the load.
• A June 2025 heist of more than $1 million worth of Nintendo Switch 2 gaming consoles from a truck that stopped in Colorado during a trip from a company distribution center in California to a GameStop store in Texas.
• A months-long 2019 cargo theft spree across Georgia and Virginia that prosecutors say netted robbers nearly $2 million in copper and electronics.
• A set of evidence videos from a case in Arizona that captured suspects taking selfie videos, dressed in tactical gear, holding what law enforcement said was “an AR type rifle with what appears to be a grenade launcher attached.”
• An August 2023 train robbery that resulted in shots being fired near the conductor in a Memphis rail yard, as box cars full of Nike sneakers were broken into.

Organized crime

Scott Jones, a former engineer who now represents rail workers as part of the Sheet Metal Air Rail Transportation or SMART Union, told Gray Media’s Arizona Family that “it’s organized crime at the highest.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation also considers cargo theft to be organized crime, and following a Congressional mandate in 2006, keeps tabs on cargo theft reports as part of its Uniform Crime Reporting System.

Cargo theft is defined by the FBI as the “criminal taking” of any kind of cargo while it is moving between its point of origin and its final destination.

According to 2024 data analyzed by InvestigateTV, the FBI tracked 5,715 instances of commercial cargo thefts, with the value of property stolen totaling more than $155.6 million.

This type of crime targets the products consumers nationwide are seeking — specifically goods that can be easily resold in a secondary market. The FBI data shows cars, electronics and clothing are the biggest targets for cargo thieves.

“That’s going to reflect in the prices you and I pay for everything that we want or need,” said Spear, of the trucking lobby. “It’s going to reflect on the prices and hopefully bring prices down by going after the bad guys.”

The data reported to the FBI is provided by local and state law enforcement agencies on a voluntary basis, and while the bureau believes the numbers are nationally representative, experts say the volume of thefts is likely much higher.

“I think that our industry has been shy about talking about cargo theft because nobody wants to know that their cargo, their freight, their truck got hit. And we’re seeing it spread so rapidly,” Spear said.

Transportation leaders, including Spear and Jefferies, the head of the rail lobby, are realizing they can no longer afford to be silent about the problem and need to work with partners to make real progress.

“Historically, we may have worked, you know, in parallel, but not necessarily arm and arm. And we’ve taken a new tack this time. We’re locked at the elbow and working and rowing in one direction in one boat,” Jefferies said.

The Rail industry, the trucking industry and others impacted by cargo theft are now moving together to try and crack down on a crime that insiders tell InvestigateTV is often handled as either an insurance claim by the businesses involved or a one-off criminal case at the local or state level.

InvestigateTV did find dozens of cargo theft cases charged or prosecuted at the federal level.

Those cases include:

• A New York enterprise was taken down after the theft of hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of imported beer from railcars.
• A truck heist in Florida that nabbed 19,000 pounds of pricey perfume.
• A massive cargo theft ring that involved suspects who followed trucks in Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio to steal expensive consumer goods such as virtual headsets to Victoria’s Secret merchandise.

Court records show those were massive, multi-state operations. Many cargo theft cases may not seem so grand, but that could be because no one’s putting together the pieces at a higher level.

While the FBI does lead some regional task forces on cargo theft and tracks that voluntarily-submitted data, there is no specific nationwide coordination on cases at the federal level, making the current system of catching thieves like the carnival game, Whack-a-Mole.

“It’s something that goes well beyond most companies’ ability to combat,” Spear said, “Which is really why we need stronger leadership by the federal government in coordination with the state and local governments.”

Plan for stronger response gains bipartisan support

Both the rail and trucking industries are now going all in on a piece of bipartisan legislation in Congress, they believe can help: the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act, known on Capitol Hill as CORCA.

“Right now, the criminal elements are very much aware of our weaknesses, and they’re manipulating them to steal consumer products and fuel their operations and so the federal government needs to respond,” said U.S. Senator Todd Young, an Indiana Republican.

So far, both the Senate and House are responding with bipartisan support for the plan that would create a national coordination center to deal with cargo theft within the Department of Homeland Security.

“It has to be one of those things where you attack it as a whole versus going at it in a piecemeal fashion,” said U.S. Representative David Joyce, the Ohio Republican who sponsored the legislation in the House.

Joyce, a former prosecutor, says the proposed coordination center would share information between industry partners and law enforcement at every level.

The bill also calls for more robust tracking of trends related to cargo theft and provides new tools to investigate and prosecute cases, which were reported in 46 states last year, according to the FBI data.

“When you see it, community by community, you realize that this is a tidal wave that’s going to hit the country because we’re not looking at all the things that are bubbling up to create the wave,” Joyce said. “We’ve got to prioritize it.”

And while there is widespread support from major stakeholders across the board and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, no one assumes the legislation is a done deal in divisive Washington.

Bills similar to CORCA have failed in recent years despite many cargo theft perpetrators’ ties to drug cartels and human trafficking, the dangers posed to transportation workers and the economic impact on consumers whose products get fenced on their way to legitimate retailers.

When asked what message it sends if CORCA doesn’t pass, Spear said, “Katie, bar the door. I mean, seriously, I think there is absolutely no resistance that our trucks are for the picking. So is rail.”

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