The fresh supply chain is not immune to cargo theft. The FBI has reported that cargo theft results in losses of $15 to $30 billion annually, and that the most targeted sector is food and drinks. This category accounted for 24% of incidents in 2015, followed by electronics at 14%.
In the fresh produce sector, almonds are most likely to be stolen, followed by tomatoes, avocados, grapes, apples, bananas, mangoes, pineapple, pistachios and walnuts. Nuts, including three of the top ten produce items, collectively account for $10 million of the industry’s loss to theft. The food and beverage sector is desirable to thieves because merchandise is easy to fence, quickly consumed and difficult to trace.
And while the trifecta of popular theft ploys is still the unloading of goods from a trailer, hitching up to a dropped trailer, or stealing both truck and trailer, the use of technology by increasingly sophisticated criminals is changing the dynamic. The trending category known as "fictitious pickup," now accounts for 10% of cargo theft, up from just 5% in 2011.
Fictitious pickup is also called "fraudulent" or "deceptive" pickup. CargoNet explains in its whitepaper, Cargo Theft By Suspicious Pickup, that in a fictitious pickup criminals trick shippers into willingly turning over loads to them. They may do this by winning a transportation bid at online load posting sites, a scenario where the cargo thief is actually hired to do the job under the guise of being a legitimate operator after having created a seemingly reputable online presence. Another tactic is for the thief to find out about a scheduled load with a reputable carrier, and then arrive early with bogus paperwork to pick it up.
Another unique approach includes unique identification technologies. For food and beverage products, it is often difficult to prove ownership of the load after apprehension. The Tulare, California Sheriff’s office has purchased a liquid product (SmartWater CSI) that can be formulated uniquely for each farmer and applied to equipment or packaging such as super sacks. When viewed under a blacklight, it can be associated the shipper to aid in apprehension of thieves and the return of property.
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