Fraud numbers in freight usually arrive as noise — a scary stat in a vendor deck, unsourced, undated. So here are the 2026 numbers with their sources attached, and the one story they tell together.
The headline numbers
Verisk CargoNet, the industry's most-cited theft database, put cargo theft losses above $359 million for the first half of 2026, with the average stolen commodity value around $341,000 — after an estimated $725 million in losses for 2025. In the second quarter of 2026 specifically, CargoNet logged 677 incidents, down 26% year over year — while losses more than doubled to $304.6 million.
Hold those two facts next to each other, because they're the whole analysis: fewer thefts, twice the money. This is not smash-and-grab getting worse. This is a business getting better.
The method behind the money
The category doing the work is what investigators call strategic theft — theft by deception rather than by bolt cutters: fictitious pickups, double brokering, impersonation of legitimate carriers with clean authority and clean records. Industry theft specialists put strategic methods at roughly 28–33% of all cargo theft, with about half of that being double-brokering schemes — and the category grew an astonishing ~1,475% between early 2022 and late 2024 before settling in as standard practice.
Double brokering alone is commonly estimated at $500–700 million a year in losses — with the honest caveat that nobody really knows, because the scams that end in a reduced payment rather than a stolen load rarely get reported anywhere.
The people responsible for stopping it agree on where it's heading. An August 2026 SmartSense survey of 150 US loss-prevention leaders found fraudulent pickups and carrier impersonation the #1 concern at 78%, double brokering at 64%, 81% saying the crime has become more organized, and 40% reporting more than $1 million a year in theft losses. And the volume upstream of the losses is enormous: industry reporting flagged fraud attempts up 219% year over year in late 2025, with more than 48,700 fake carrier identities identified.
What the numbers mean operationally
Read as one dataset, 2026 says three things.
Fraud is an identity crime now. The growth is entirely in methods where someone convinces you they're a legitimate carrier. The defense, therefore, is identity verification — domains, phones, officers, addresses — not padlocks.
Targeting is professional. Losses doubling while incidents fall means loads are being chosen: metals and electronics, high value, tight timelines, stressed desks. If you broker attractive freight, assume you're being shopped.
The averages are unsurvivable. At ~$341K per stolen shipment, a small brokerage doesn't absorb one clean hit, let alone the pattern the 40%-over-$1M crowd is living with.
This dataset is why Dollar Traq's fraud stack starts before the load — identity checks on every carrier email, census-diff screening for reincarnated authorities, and COI verification against the issuing source — because every number above describes a crime that succeeds or fails at the moment of carrier selection, not at the truck stop.
Sources: Verisk CargoNet quarterly analyses (2025–2026); SmartSense Cargo Theft Report, Aug 2026; industry theft-trend reporting via FreightWaves, Overdrive and Inbound Logistics.