The claim that cargo theft and freight fraud account for just 0.0036% of freight activity has been circulating widely across the industry. Framed that way, it makes the issue seem minor, manageable and unlikely to affect most businesses in a meaningful way. But that conclusion depends on one major assumption: that the data captures what is actually happening.
It does not.
That percentage reflects only what gets reported and tracked, not the full scale of what takes place inside day-to-day freight operations.
The problem begins with a clear visibility gap. Cargo theft and freight fraud are often not reported to insurers, law enforcement or the FMCSA. Some cases are absorbed as operational losses, while others are never formally identified as fraud at all. That means the baseline data is incomplete from the start.
As Dale Prax, Strategic Fraud Advisor at Truckstop.com, put it, the 0.0036% figure is not reality. It is simply a reflection of what gets reported, not what is actually happening.
Once you look at how these schemes unfold, that becomes easier to understand. Double brokering, identity theft, load diversion, and payment fraud often move through normal-looking workflows and appear legitimate at first. By the time they are recognised, the damage has already been done, and many incidents never make it into any formal reporting system.
The industry often refers to around $6 billion in annual cargo theft losses, based on reported incidents and modelling. But that number reflects only the visible portion of the problem. Many experts believe that just 10% to 15% of cargo theft and freight fraud cases are actually reported.
If that is true, the real exposure could be closer to $40 billion to $60 billion. In the context of a US trucking economy worth roughly $900 billion to $1 trillion, that would represent around 4% to 6% of the total market.
And the cost goes beyond the freight itself. Companies are also hit by recovery efforts, re-delivery, product replacement, inventory gaps, internal investigations, claims handling, administrative costs, higher insurance premiums, larger deductibles and, in some cases, damaged or lost customer relationships.
That is why Prax argues that the financial impact is not just the value of the stolen shipment, but often several multiples of it.
The exposure is also not evenly spread across the industry. Risk is concentrated in freight categories that are easier to resell and convert into cash, including electronics, apparel, food and beverage, pharmaceuticals, and household goods. In these more liquid segments, the real exposure can be far higher than any industry-wide average suggests.
Seen that way, this is not really a 0.0036% issue at all. In the most targeted freight categories, effective exposure could be closer to 15% to 20%.
But perhaps the bigger issue is systemic. Bad actors can re-enter the market quickly under new identities or slightly modified information. Carrier verification still relies heavily on self-reported data, creating repeated opportunities for fraudsters to exploit the same weaknesses.
Enforcement also tends to come after the fact, once the freight has already disappeared or the damage has already been done. That creates a cycle in which the same vulnerabilities keep being used over and over again.
That helps explain why several US states, including California, Texas, Florida, Illinois and Arizona, are now dedicating real resources to cargo theft and freight fraud through task forces and coordinated enforcement efforts. At the federal level, legislation such as the Combatting Organized Retail Crime Act and the Cargo Security Innovation Act is also moving forward with bipartisan support.
These are not the kinds of responses governments make to statistical background noise. They reflect a problem that is growing, becoming more organised, and proving much larger than the most commonly cited numbers suggest.
