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Electronic devices are among the most highly targeted items by cargo thieves. (gorodenkoff/Getty Images)

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Heightened risk of fraud and theft this holiday season adds to the challenges the trucking industry already is contending with, experts warned.

“The clearest takeaway is that cargo theft and fraud are entering 2026 from a structurally higher baseline, not just a seasonal uptick,” said Hamish Woodrow, head of strategic analytics at “We are moving past the point where these are just seasonal spikes; they are becoming persistent, high-cost operational risks that the holiday peak merely amplifies.”

The Motive Holiday Outlook Report 2025-2026 cautioned that the peak season increases transaction volume and velocity so a slow response to thefts can be especially costly. It surveyed transportation leaders who estimated that 19% of overall fleet spend is lost to fraud or theft. Woodrow warned that cargo thieves are becoming more organized and targeted, and that high-velocity transactions make fraud harder to detect. He suggested fleets deploy artificial intelligence, enhance visibility, tighten physical handoffs and improve recoveries.

“Cargo thieves are increasingly focused on high-demand, easy-to-resell commodities like alcohol, meat and electronics,” Woodrow said. “In some regions, especially Mexico, but increasingly in parts of the U.S., organizations are reporting inventory shrinkage during transit, where fleets arrive at receivers with less product than invoiced.”

The holiday peak brings more than just volume this year. According to the Motive Holiday Outlook Report 2025-2026, 66% of Christmas Day collisions last year occurred on wet, snowy, or icy roads.

Read the full report for strategies on protecting drivers and navigating the shift… — Motive (@Motive_inc)

Verisk CargoNet has been tracking a significant rise in thefts since the coronavirus pandemic. The theft prevention and recovery company found that cargo theft activity across the United States and Canada increased 27% year-over-year to a record-breaking 3,625 reported incidents in 2024. Holidays tend to be an especially active period as evidenced by a 12% rise between Dec. 23 and Jan. 2, 2025.

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“Around every holiday, regardless of the holiday, we get sloppy,” said Keith Lewis, vice president of operations at CargoNet. “We still have to get the same number of loads out the door, we just have less time to do it. So we become sloppier, our vetting goes down. I can tell you what happened last week. We had a load of copper stolen, holiday week, and we’ve got less days to move the load so the vetting process goes down.”

Lewis noted that the company had been warned by its security team not to use a particular driver, but the driver was able to get a load of copper regardless because of how busy the company was. The driver ended up stealing the load.

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“We’ve definitely been seeing an uptick just in December so far,” said Danny Ramon, director of intelligence and response at Overhaul. “We’ve seen a little bit of an uptick in terms of strategic theft attempts and successful strategic thefts. We’ve seen an uptick in pilferages, both over-the-road and on-rail, large-scale pilferage, and we do expect that to continue.”

Ramon noted cargo thieves leverage the rush of the holiday shopping season to operate unnoticed. He also expects that the criminals will deploy a new fictitious or fraudulent method and noted that over the past couple of years criminals have used the holidays to either devise a new methodology or combine previous methods.

“They operate within the logistics industry, and they have for several years at this point,” Ramon said. “They know that in the rush to realize revenue by shipping product off of the dock, that the first corner to be cut is very often security.”

Overhaul expects to see the usual 10% to 15% bump in overall theft volume in the fourth quarter due to increased cargo flowing through supply chains during the holiday season.

Ramon still is concerned about the increasing sophistication and where it might occur.

“It’s hard to have a crystal ball on expectations and exactly know what is going to happen,” said Krenar Komoni, founder of the shipment tracking and technology company Tive. “However, one thing that is clear, the bad actors that are involved with that have become much smarter than they were a year ago, or two and three years ago, and one of the main reasons behind that has to do with AI. But it also has to do with ability to do phishing, spoofing and buying motor carrier numbers from carriers that are desperate to sell them.”

Komoni suggested that shippers take a layered approach toward mitigating theft risk. The first layer is verifying the legitimacy of the carrier, followed by implementing cybersecurity measures and ensuring the cargo can be tracked.

“I would expect it to be worse than last year, but I really don’t have a crystal ball on how much worse or what’s going to happen,” Komoni said. “It’s easier for them to go and use AI voice to communicate with shippers. It’s easier for them to act like a legitimate carrier. It’s easier for them to generate PDFs that look like they’re from a legitimate company.”