A thief stole $9.5 million in Apple products and $6 million in AMD chips from a Reno warehouse. Photo / Getty Images
The cargo thief waited until the last worker left the warehouse in Reno, Nevada, before he pulled into the deserted parking lot a little after midnight last July.
He seemed to know exactly what he wanted. He quickly backed up his truck cab to a nondescript white 16m trailer, jumped out, hooked up his rig and drove off, disappearing out of range of the security cameras.
In 14 minutes, the thief made off with an estimated US$9.5 million ($160m) in Apple products and US$6m in AMD computer chips, according to a police report.
A detective later found the trailer’s discarded GPS tracking device, wires dangling, in the dirt near Interstate 80. Two weeks later, they found the empty trailer about 450km away in California. The stolen goods remain missing.
Losses from cargo theft have surged nationwide, jumping 60% last year in the United States to a record US$725m, even as the number of reported incidents remained essentially flat at about 3600 cases a year, according to theft prevention firm Verisk CargoNet.
That’s because of a new twist on an old idea: there is plenty of money to be made from stealing goods in transit. But it’s no longer about just looting cartons of cigarettes or pallets of laundry detergent and energy drinks.
Thieves today are targeting the pricey computer parts driving the artificial intelligence (AI) and tech booms, snatching high-speed RAM modules, advanced computer chips and server racks as they flow toward the data centres and related industries popping up across the country. The thieves are also using increasingly sophisticated means to pull off their heists.
“It’s a push-pull thing – whatever is being pulled through the supply chain at high speed, that’s what the bad guys are stealing,” Keith Lewis of CargoNet said. “Right now, we’re seeing a chip shortage and the emergence of AI data centres.”
Earlier this year, Lewis helped out with a case involving the recovery of a US$100m computer component used in chip manufacturing. Police stumbled upon it during a search warrant raid in California. The component had been stolen off a truck trailer so recently that the freight broker “didn’t even know about the theft yet”, he said.
Last month, a trailer carrying a US$1.5m shipment of computer graphics cards destined for Columbus, Ohio, vanished from Fullerton, California, according to an internal industry Bolo (be on the lookout) report. In December, a trailer with a US$3.1m load of hard drives disappeared before it reached Mesa, Arizona, home to data centres run by companies such as Meta. And last summer, a nearly US$200,000 shipment of Nvidia chips was stolen in Fremont, California by a group of thieves that police believe specialised in high-value computer parts.
“We are seeing a consistent number of investigations coming to us for follow-up,” Sergeant Andrew Barclay of the California Highway Patrol, which has a special cargo theft unit, said.
The true scale of America’s cargo theft problem is hard to get a handle on. There’s no official definition of cargo theft – it might be categorised in some places as a stolen vehicle or it could be stolen property. Manufacturers and the trucking industry often are reluctant to discuss cases in detail because they involve so many different parties – shippers, brokers, distributors and insurance companies among them. “There’s a lot of finger-pointing,” Lewis said.
Losses are probably 10 to 15 times higher than the official count, Scott Cornell, a transportation risk analyst and chairman of the Transported Asset Protection Association, said.
Cornell’s group is among the trade organisations pushing for cargo theft to get more attention from federal authorities under a proposed law targeting organised retail theft, such as co-ordinated shoplifting scams. Last summer, at a Senate judiciary committee hearing on the bill, trucking logistics executive Donna Lemm said companies hit by cargo thefts are “reluctant to speak up and put a larger target on their back”. Others fear reputational harm, she said.
Lemm also pointed out that the losses from cargo thefts increase prices for consumers.
Cargo thieves began targeting tech products soon after the pandemic, officials say. That used to mean flat-screen monitors and TVs. Then it was crypto-mining rigs, iPhones and computer gaming setups.
Now, it’s AI.
“The bad guys keep on top of what’s popular,” Cornell said.
When egg prices soared last year, thieves appeared to respond. About 100,000 eggs valued at US$40,000 were stolen out of a trailer in Greencastle, Pennsylvania, in February 2025. Two months later, a shipment of 280,000 eggs disappeared from a farm in Warwick, Maryland.
Then egg prices fell. So did the egg thefts.
Technology makes for a better target than just about any other product right now, whether it’s eggs or diapers or Nike Air Jordans, Danny Ramon of Overhaul, a supply chain security firm, said.
Thieves, Ramon said, are “really focused on cost density”.
One cargo thief ring in the Midwest targeted distribution facilities for companies such as Meta and Microsoft, conducting surveillance and following the trucks as they drove off, federal prosecutors said. The group then stole the loaded tractor-trailers when the drivers stopped to refuel or rest. They abandoned the stolen trucks nearby, reattaching the trailers to their own trucks and painting over trailer logos and swapping out the licence plates to avoid detection. In January, the last of the six members convicted of crimes related to interstate transportation of stolen property was sentenced to 13-and-a-half years in prison.
But they were employing old-school tactics.
Shipping firms have got wise to these kinds of thefts. Now, with high-value loads, it is common for truckers to be instructed to not stop for any reason for the first 200 miles (320km). That’s to make it harder for crews trailing them on the road. Trailers also often have GPS devices and special locks.
That hasn’t slowed the new crop of cargo thieves.
They increasingly rely on sophisticated strategy and deception that, in some cases, results in the goods being gone for hours or days before anyone realises, industry officials say.
The cargo industry noticed a clear shift in heist tactics in the middle of 2023, with apparent involvement from organised criminal groups with ties to Mexico and Asia, according to an Overhaul report. That might help explain how criminals are able to unload the specialised tech hardware, which is not as easy to sell on the black market as a pair of sneakers.
The thieves exploit weaknesses in trucking supply chains, creating fake logistics and trucking companies and fraudulent bills of lading, using fictitious pick-ups and insider information to get their hands on multimillion-dollar loads.
In those cases, everything looks normal until the tractor-trailer fails to turn up at its destination.
“It’s harder to recognise when the cargo just disappears off the grid,” Ramon said.
In September, a man walked into a shipping company in Salt Lake City posing as a truck driver who was supposed to haul a trailer 13 hours to El Paso.
Officials don’t know how he inserted himself into the supply chain. But the shipping company didn’t suspect a thing. The fake driver even agreed to his phone being tracked, a common request for high-value loads. His GPS trail went cold about an hour outside El Paso.
The trailer was discovered days later in Irwindale, California, not far from the Port of Long Beach, one of the world’s busiest shipping ports.
Gone was the trailer’s load of 40 AI server racks and 108,230 memory modules that are often used in AI data centres, according to an industry Bolo notice.
The stolen cargo was valued at US$31m.
“That’s a big one,” Lewis said.
The Utah Attorney-General’s Office is investigating.
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