Cargo theft, led by food and beverage, is surging across the U.S.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/25/cargo-theft-led-by-food-and-beverage-is-surging-across-the-us.html

by cwwc • 3 years ago

116 160 3 years ago

walrus01• 3 years ago

Does anyone remember the news from several years ago regarding the massive theft at a Canadian maple syrup reserve? Apparently the barrels were drained and refilled with water.

Overtonwindow2• 3 years ago

That I actually don't mind because the government controls the production and distribution of maple syrup in Canada and unfairly harms independent growers in favor of its own cartel.

toomuchtodo• 3 years ago

This made me chuckle because of the analogy to bearer bonds.

“They’re insured by the government! Don’t be a hero, everyone gets to go to their family.” But maple syrup.

Waterluvian5• 3 years ago

I tap my own trees. Don’t tell the government, I guess?

I haven’t actually heard of this before. Are you talking about how they regulate quality and grade in order to prevent low-quality knock-offs from hurting farmers? I’ll have to ask the local syrup farmers in town next time I’m at the market what they think.

Waterluvian5• 3 years ago

Which is ridiculous because every Canadian knows what a full cask of Grade A Amber feels like in the hands. If you’re going to pull this heist, don’t get sloppy. Use Clamato.

t-writescode3• 3 years ago

So, people are starving and so they’re stealing food - even to organized crime levels of food theft?

AnimalMuppet• 3 years ago

There is no connection between "people are starving" and organized gangs stealing $200K of cargo at a pop. The organized gangs aren't Robin Hood. They aren't giving it to hungry people.

t-writescode3• 3 years ago

Are you missing the global context of how much more expensive food is?

Sure they might not be “giving it to hungry people” that you know; but they themselves might also be hungry, or people they know. We have no idea what they’re doing with the food; and that means both of us don’t know.

roenxi• 3 years ago

Although arguably this would be an economic inefficiency and so increases the cost of getting food to those starving people.

londons_explore5• 3 years ago

The organized gangs aren't Robin Hood. They aren't giving it to hungry people.

There are many cases where organised gangs are robin hood. Gangs need the local population on their side. They will pay for festivals, art, schools, etc. sometimes.

fortran772• 3 years ago

Could it be a response to our Government's wage and saving theft that comes from printing money to bail out Silicon Valley Bank and to pay for rich kid's college loans? (I don't think so. Someone just found a risk/reward profile to make money that they're willing to bet on.)

solatic• 3 years ago

The question is, where is the food and beverage going to? Containers don't have $214k of a balanced variety of foods, they have thousands of boxes of cereal. No thief is eating their way through a shipping container's worth of cereal.

Prior articles (e.g. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/17/the-fight-against-stolen-pro... ) have written about how Amazon is turning into a semi-legitimate fence for stolen goods; the seller-thief can list the stolen goods, ship to an Amazon warehouse, where Amazon provides the marketplace for a cut of the proceeds. The FTC may not care enough about Amazon turning into a front for counterfeit goods; will the FTC finally wake up and target Amazon for dealing in stolen goods?

colechristensen6• 3 years ago

It doesn’t work much if you’re selling individual stolen items but if you steal a truckload of something the FTC or whoever would be reasonable in requesting that lot codes/serial numbers/whatever identifying information be checked against a list of stolen items.

londons_explore5• 3 years ago

Some countries (eg. Thailand) have a centralised government system for managing this.

On every receipt, by law, is a unique barcode encoding the shop and purchase value. That barcode, when scanned, leads to a government webpage (and doing your taxes involves scanning each barcode for anything deductible, so many of the receipts get scanned).

On that webpage, occasionally they ask for a photo of the best before label of the goods. The best before date usually includes the lot number.

Now, the government has a list of lots of serial numbers and associated retailers. They can now easily punish those who regularly sell stolen goods.

costco• 3 years ago

This already happens and its called LeadsOnline. When someone reports something stolen the serial number gets added to it. Pawn shops in most states are required to use it or something similar before they buy an item. eCommerce marketplaces do not have that requirement in most places. LeadsOnline does partner with eBay however.

kevin_thibedeau• 3 years ago

The thieves sell to local independent stores that don't care that their wholesale price is too good to be true. That allows you to move low margin and short self life consumables without having to deal with Amazon.

Kye2• 3 years ago

There's an entire world of stores that sell "expired," discontinued, and massively discounted stuff. It's the stage after things have made their way through the Walmarts and Dollar Generals of the world.

edit: DavidPeiffer correctly notes the air quotes. Packaging uses all kinds of phrasing to indicate when the manufacturer moves all responsibility to the store and the consumer.

zamnos• 3 years ago

On the other hand, who doesn't have an Amazon account these days? Selling to a local independent store (especially these days when Safeway/Albertsons/Ralphs /Whole Foods dominates the landscape) means actually finding unscrupulous market owners and convincing them to take your product. And it's not like they have a warehouse to hold $200k worth of cereal either. Meanwhile, all you need to participate in FBA is an identity that hasn't been banned yet.

The other thing is though, this isn't jewelry and cocaine, it's cereal and baby formula. They could just, y'know, give it away. It isn't always about the money, especially if you're poor, and if you're poor, you know other poor people, and everyone can use a little bit of help. With food prices up, giving away a lot of free cereal makes you a lot of friends. Not as much as free cocaine does, maybe, but people still appreciate what you can give them.

Thieves aren't some cartoon villains, they exist among us other humans.

eunos• 3 years ago

. No thief is eating their way through a shipping container's worth of cereal.

Resell online or even on street.

astura• 3 years ago

They are selling it online

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/17/the-fight-against-stolen-pro...

Amazon , eBay and Facebook are the places where these stolen goods are being sold, and critics say they’re not doing enough to put an end to the racket. The companies disagree.

maxerickson• 3 years ago

Seems like valuable food cargo is gonna be stuff like liquor.

Booze probably has better grey market value than most perishable items.

oasisbob• 3 years ago

Which analysts or industries consider liquor to be a foodstuff?

washywashy• 3 years ago

Could stores that are fronts for money laundering buy at inflated prices?

acuozzo2• 3 years ago

This obviously doesn't answer your question at scale, but lots of stolen "common" goods like cereal and deodorant are sold at places like this: http://www.northpointfleamarket.com/

boomboomsubban3• 3 years ago

Cargo theft accounts for $15-30 billion dollars lost each year, my quick search says shoplifting accounts for $15-20 billion dollars per year.

Why do we hear so much more about shoplifting? Sure it's more public, but I've seen dozens of stories about how shoplifting is destroying retail and this is the first one about cargo theft I can recall.

tbihl• 3 years ago

Article says the average cargo theft is $214K, which I'll guess is more than average shoplifting, meaning cargo theft is less frequent. Logistics companies are less relatable than physical stores where people have been.

Cargo theft is just less relatable in every way.

imtringued• 3 years ago

Also the criminals end up rich and in capitalism having money increases your self worth and you are rewarded for having money no matter where it came from.

delecti4• 3 years ago

Cynically? Because people understand shoplifting more, and the media can blame it on the poor/homeless and use it as fuel to increase police budgets. Wage theft is also in the same order of magnitude (the infographic on Wikipedia says >$19 billion in 2012), and similarly doesn't get the same kind of coverage. Capital and the police scratch each other's backs.

colechristensen6• 3 years ago

I have met several people who stole things for fun and talked openly about it. Not to make money or to fulfill some fundamental need, but just for the thrill and to get something they couldn’t afford or didn’t want to pay for.

chongli2• 3 years ago

Capital and the police scratch each other's backs.

Why wouldn’t capital be all over the police to crack down on cargo theft?

gruez6• 3 years ago

the media can blame it on the poor/homeless and use it as fuel to increase police budgets

Why would "the media" care about police budgets?

rsynnott• 3 years ago

And all pale in comparison next to tax evasion (the IRS estimates this at one trillion dollars per year for the US, and even more conservative estimates are in the hundreds of billions).

fabianhjr3• 3 years ago

The same reason the media doesn't focus on the biggest theft category: wage theft.

It is easier to vilify individuals than to reduce the need for food theft (depressed wages and lack of economic opportunities for most people)

missedthecue2• 3 years ago

The media also doesn't focus on the inverse of wage theft: time theft, which is probably an order of magnitude larger than wage theft, if not more.

edit: CBS reports wage theft at $50 billion a year while a 2007 study in the Kentucky CPA Journal puts time theft in the US at $400 billion per year.

gretch• 3 years ago

Because cargo theft is not something an average person has any involvement with.

People know what shoplifting is and they might encounter it in their day to day life.

If some cargo container goes missing, what does that even have to do with me? It’s just some minutiae of an inefficient system as far as an average person is aware

rizzom5000• 3 years ago

Between the two, on the low end, that looks like a per capita donation of around $100/year to criminals, not including all of the other associated costs related to theft prevention, enforcement, incarceration and so on.

newsclues• 3 years ago

Wait until you find out how much wage theft occurs.

s1artibartfast• 3 years ago

Visibility and customer impact would be my answer.

I've never seen a car go with theft but I've seen masked Bandits robbing a store several times. It is very uncomfortable and frankly scary to watch people come in with balaclavas and start grabbing power tools or whatever they want.

It is also very frustrating to shop in stores where many items are under lock and key

nitwit0053• 3 years ago

The news companies hardly have reporters anymore, and are often more than happy to pick up press releases companies create for them. It frequently seems to be a way to lobby for more police protection.

throwawayasz• 3 years ago

Everyone deserves to eat. If state fails to feed the masses this is what happens.

fwlr• 3 years ago

I am surprised that logistics security is lax enough to allow for (what sounds like) simple impersonation scams to work. Even before food prices went up, these containers must have been worth at least $50k, I honestly would have expected fairly thorough identity checks before handing it over. Perhaps the impersonation is not as simple as the article leads one to believe, though.

lotsofpulp2• 3 years ago

Living in a high trust society is nice, and results in lower costs, money-wise and mentally. Too bad it is a fragile sentiment that is difficult to repair.

acuozzo2• 3 years ago

Too bad it is a fragile sentiment that is difficult to repair.

Too many people have a hard time meeting their material needs which creates demand for crimes like this.

A prerequisite for a high trust society is that it must be one in which very few (if any!) of its members are in a position in which they don't know where their next meal is coming from.

Look at Jack London's struggle to find a meal in "On The Road" for an emblematic example and know now that US citizens are far less trusting of one another now than they were then.

UncleEntity• 3 years ago

I drive a truck.

Most of the time all you need is the pickup number and they’ll either fill up the trailer or give you the paperwork for a preloaded one. Certain shippers just have loaded trailers sitting in a lot and you go grab the bills out of a dropbox and take off with a trailer without dealing with anyone — had someone take my load out of one of those once but, luckily, it was someone from the same company and both loads had the same second stop so it got straightened out before they made it hundreds of miles in the wrong direction. Still a stupid thing to do because they took the wrong bills too and they specifically ask you to read the destination address off the bills when you do a loaded call.

Some places ask to see your drivers license, kind of rare though.

keyme• 3 years ago

I'm sure this has nothing to do with all the "defund the police" bullshit from a while ago.

TheSecondMouse• 3 years ago

Why would it?

h2odragon• 3 years ago

Many people suspected "defund the police" would lead to an increase in crime, and said so. Often risking their reputation to do so, and being accused of racism, heresy, deviation-ism, and so on.

Now that crime has risen in the past couple years, it's amazing how many people never said "defund the police" and when confronted with the evidence that they did say that "din't mean it that way."

nkrisc2• 3 years ago

How many police departments were actually “defunded” and how does that correlate with the topic of this article?

bluescrn2• 3 years ago

Even if they weren’t directly defunded, they were probably demoralized, and likely lost good staff during the ‘ACAB’ period. Would you really want to remain a cop when ‘all cops’ are suddenly so viciously hated by so many in the media, politics, and activism?

Mizoguchi• 3 years ago

"It’s a sign of the economic times... "

Right, people are so hungry they are teaming up and putting together elaborated plans to steal containers of (likely) booze.

t0bia_s• 3 years ago

When rich rob poors, it's called business. When poors rob rich, it's theft. /capitalism

not_enoch_wise• 3 years ago

Great excuse to ignore the warnings and use AI to police the populace!

incone1233• 3 years ago

How would ai stop brazen container theft? unless it's powering an ED-209

tiedieconderoga• 3 years ago

Maybe have an AI analyze the large network of license plate readers on major roads, and make predictions about suspicious activity? Or do the same with cell location data?

Most highway traffic speeds run at least 15mph over the posted speed limit in the US. You could have the AI choose who to pull over based on other factors.

There's plenty of precedent for that kind of thing. Parallel construction, out-of-state plate speed traps, etc.

horns4lyfe2• 3 years ago

If it slows the American descent into a low trust society without functional goods and spaces not destroyed by anti social freaks, then great

Eddy_Viscosity2• 3 years ago

This a good example of the free market self correcting imbalances. Other examples include, Canada raises taxes on tabacco and the resulting huge wave of black market tabacco, the music industry and the rise of napster, and also the entire illicit drug industry. Not saying anything about these being good or bad, just that its an expected outcome.

ouid• 3 years ago

adding further pressure to the high prices faced by consumers during an elevated inflation environment.

Food price increases are being led by effective grocery monopolies. If cargo is being stolen and then sold, it is adding a competitor to the effetive monopolies, and one which is extremely motivated to sell quickly. That force should drive prices down, although perhaps negligibly.

vjfrdv2• 3 years ago

Nope. Every non boutique grocer makes very little margin and is all about efficiency.

Seriously look at Walmart, Kroger, etc.

There aren’t monopolies in commodity industries but I find it quaint you seem to someone think there are based on hallucinated first principles.

Cargo theft, led by food and beverage, is surging across the U.S.

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