Losses surged even as incident counts held steady. Here's what changed, why it matters, and a practical playbook for protecting your freight.
By the Sentrick Cargo team · Published July 8, 2026
If your freight moves high-value or temperature-sensitive loads, 2025 was a warning shot. According to Verisk CargoNet's 2025 year-end supply chain risk analysis (released January 22, 2026), estimated cargo theft losses across the United States and Canada reached nearly $725 million — a 60% increase over 2024. The striking part isn't just the size of the number; it's how the industry got there.
Verisk CargoNet recorded 3,594 supply chain crime events in 2025 — essentially unchanged from the 3,607 events reported in 2024. Yet within that stable total, confirmed cargo theft incidents rose 18% year over year, from 2,243 to 2,646 (Verisk CargoNet, January 2026). And the average value per theft climbed to $273,990 in 2025, up 36% from $202,364 in 2024 (Verisk CargoNet, January 2026).
In plain terms: thieves aren't necessarily hitting more often. They're hitting smarter — targeting higher-value freight and moving into new geographies. Verisk CargoNet attributes the surge in losses to exactly this strategic shift by organized criminal groups toward premium cargo, rather than to a broad rise in opportunistic theft.
Most theft-prevention programs were built for a smash-and-grab world: a locked yard, a seal on the door, a GPS dot to check after the fact. But the modern cargo theft playbook is increasingly built on deception rather than force — fictitious pickups, identity and carrier impersonation, and "strategic" theft where a load is diverted before anyone realizes it's gone. A location ping alone can't tell you that the truck currently sitting at a legitimate-looking address is being unloaded by the wrong people.
The core problem is signal versus noise. A basic tracker reports where a shipment is, constantly. It does not tell you whether that shipment is in danger. Teams drown in routine pings and miss the one deviation that actually mattered — the unscheduled two-hour stop, the door sensor tripping at 3 a.m., the reefer drifting warm on a route it should never have taken.
No single control stops determined, organized theft. Prevention works in layers — combining people, process, and technology so that a gap in one is caught by another:
This is the gap Sentrick Cargo is built to close. Instead of only broadcasting location, it learns what "normal" looks like for each shipment — route, handling, and temperature — and classifies risk on a five-level behavioral status: Safe, Caution, Alert, Danger, and SOS. The goal is simple: turn a flood of raw sensor data into a small number of calibrated, explainable alerts, each with a reason and a location, so a night team can understand a threat in one glance.
Technology alone won't reverse a 60% loss trend — but the 2025 data makes the direction of travel clear. As theft grows more strategic and more expensive per event, the operators who fare best will be the ones who can tell danger from noise before a load is gone.
Figures in this article are drawn from Verisk CargoNet's 2025 year-end cargo theft analysis, released January 22, 2026: "Cargo Theft Losses Surge to Estimated $725 Million in 2025, Verisk CargoNet Analysis Reveals."