The 2025 Cargo Theft Numbers Every Mid-Market Shipper Needs to Memorize

"Criminal enterprises are becoming more selective and sophisticated, targeting extremely high value shipments rather than relying on opportunistic theft." — Keith Lewis, VP of Operations, Verisk CargoNet

Cargo theft in 2025 didn't get more common. It got more expensive.

That's the headline finding from CargoNet's annual report — and it's the framing every mid-market shipper needs to understand. The number of incidents was essentially flat against 2024 (3,594 vs. 3,607). The losses jumped 60%, to roughly $725 million.

This piece is a single page where you can find the numbers, sourced and dated. We'll keep it updated. The rest of this blog links back here when we need to anchor a claim about cargo theft, freight fraud, or concealed-damage exposure.

The headline numbers

The shape of those numbers matters more than the totals. Volume is flat. Per-theft value is way up. Criminals are choosing better targets, not running more jobs. That changes the defensive playbook.

Strategic cargo theft is the story

For a long time, cargo theft meant a truck stop, a bolt cutter, a pallet of TVs gone in the night.

That's still happening. But the category that's exploded is strategic theft — fraud-based schemes where the cargo is taken without anyone breaking a lock. Fictitious pickup. Double brokering. Identity theft. The "Trojan driver" — a real driver with fake credentials, dispatched against a real load.

The numbers:

• Strategic theft is now roughly 33% of all cargo theft incidents, according to American Trucking Associations and Travelers' Scott Cornell.
• That's up from roughly 3% in early 2021. ATA cites the cumulative growth as ~1,500% since Q1 2021. (Frame it that way — the base period was historically low.)
• The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center issued PSA260430 on April 30, 2026, explicitly warning that cyber-enabled cargo theft is "surging" and that criminals are posting fake loads "in the tens of thousands" on freight load boards.

What this means at the dock: the threat used to live at the perimeter (yards, fences, parked trailers). It now lives at the paperwork. A real driver shows up at your dock with a fake assignment and walks off with a real load. The defense is no longer a stronger lock — it's a verifiable chain of custody.

Where the theft happens

The geographic concentration in 2025 was extreme:

• California: 38% of US cargo theft incidents.
• Texas: 20%.
• Together: 58% of all reported US incidents (FreightWaves).

If your lanes touch CA or TX, the base rate is meaningfully different from the national average. CargoNet put the daily incident rate at 7.16 thefts per day in 2025, up from 6.07/day in 2024.

What it costs an individual operator

The whole-economy numbers are big and abstract. The per-fleet numbers are the ones you put in a budget.

ATRI's October 2025 cargo theft cost study:

• Average cost per motor carrier: $520,000 per year.
• Average cost per 3PL: $1.84 million per year.
• Industry-wide impact: up to $6.6 billion when secondary effects are included.

For comparison, the State of Logistics Report 2025 (CSCMP / Penske / Kearney) puts total US business logistics costs at $2.58 trillion (8.8% of GDP). Cargo theft is a small share of that, but it's a share that compounds — through insurance premiums, customer trust, and operational drag.

The global picture

For shippers with international exposure, BSI / TT Club's 2024 Cargo Theft Report (published April 2025) is the flagship cite:

• Trucks accounted for ~70% of all globally-recorded cargo theft incidents.
• Insider involvement appeared in roughly 22% of cases — employees, contractors, or known associates.
• Rail theft jumped from 4% to 10% of incidents YoY, an increasingly active vector.

The insider number is the one operators underestimate. A photo trail at the dock isn't just defense against external theft — it's defense against internal collusion.

The 2026 trajectory so far

CargoNet's Q1 2026 update suggests the trend isn't reversing:

• Q1 2026 events: down 5.3% YoY.
• Q1 2026 losses: still ~$131.6M.
• Highway blocked 527,940 fraudulent emails in Q1 2026 — up 50% YoY.
• Identity-theft reports: up 89.6% YoY.

The quarterly pattern echoes the annual one: incident counts flatten or dip, but the fraud-and-impersonation layer keeps climbing. The federal regulatory response is starting to catch up — the Senate Commerce Committee held a "Grand Theft Cargo" hearing in February 2025, and DOT issued a public RFI on cargo theft in September 2025.

In the meantime, defense lives at the dock.

What it means for documentation

Photo evidence at the dock has gone from "nice to have" to "the most cost-effective fraud control on the perimeter." The reasons are mechanical:

• Strategic theft depends on impersonation and document forgery. A photo of the driver, the truck, and the BOL together at the moment of pickup forecloses most of the impersonation surface.
• Insider theft depends on the absence of contemporaneous evidence. Photos taken at fixed checkpoints — arrival, pre-unload, departure — make collusion harder because there's now a record someone has to alter or suppress.
• Concealed damage and OS&D claims depend on what you can prove arrived, when, and in what condition. Photos at receipt resolve these in days instead of weeks. (See: Receiving Documentation — The Other Half of Proof.)

The numbers in this piece make the case for a documentation system. Which one you pick is a separate question.

How DockSnap fits

DockSnap is built specifically around the dock-side photo habit:

• Operator opens the app, taps Ship or Receive.
• Takes the five photos that matter (we wrote those up in Five Things to Photograph at Every Inbound).
• Tags the shipment by barcode, OCR, or reference.
• Photos land in a central, time-stamped, searchable library.

That's it. The operator doesn't have to think about filing, sharing, or fraud detection. The photos exist, they're tagged, they're indexed against the shipment.

If your operation runs through California, Texas, or any high-fraud lane, the case for structured documentation has changed shape over the last 18 months. Get started, or take our Dock Documentation Scorecard to see where your current process stands.