As the transportation industry continues to grapple with surging cargo theft and ever-evolving tactics from bad actors, fleets and shippers are also having to evolve in their prevention efforts.
Load tracking, whether by motor carriers, brokers or shippers, is nearly ubiquitous across the industry, but bulk transportation management service provider IntelliTrans says simply knowing where a load is doesn’t provide enough information to prevent a theft.
Beyond tracking, implementing a system in which managers can geofence the actual route the truck is supposed to take to get to its destination, and set up alerts if it deviates from the route, can provide that extra layer of security.
Hear more in this week’s 10-44 with IntelliTrans SVP of Sales & Marketing Matt Everson.
[Related: Overhaul ranks cargo theft high risk in the second half of 2026]
Contents of this video
00:00 10-44 Intro
00:37 Why Raw Location Tracking Isn't Enough
01:59 High Value Cargo, Freight Fraud & Phishing Scams
03:21 Setting Up Geofencing & Automated Risk Alerts
04:31 Best Practices for Shippers: Domain Verification & Real-Time Tools
Matt Cole:
Why standard shipment tracking isn't good enough in today's cargo theft environment?
Jason Cannon:
Hey everybody. Welcome back to the 1044. I'm Jason Cannon and my co-host is Matt Cole. Cargo theft losses are hitting an all-time high despite increased efforts from shippers, fleets, and brokers alike to mitigate the risk of freight being stolen. With the holiday shipping season approaching, theft activity is expected to increase.
Matt Cole:
So what can the trucking industry do about it? Transportation management service provider Inteletrans says raw visibility into where the load is, isn't good enough to stop theft on its own.
Matt Everson:
We are a bulk and brake bulk shipper TMS provider. So we work with enterprise size customers primarily that have a lot of inbound logistics and move bulk commodities on the rail, but also on the truck side as well. We're seeing a lot of fraudulent providers coming out there pretending to be somebody else. And when we look at the commodities we ship from our customers, some of those high value commodities such as copper are targets from what we're seeing. But visibility is one thing, right? Having a tracking update and a ping is really important today more than ever, but it's not necessarily the location ping that is the value. It's the knowing where trailer is and where it belongs. So knowing where a trailer is tells you really nothing about where it belongs. The protection comes with context of, hey, what is the expected route? What is the expected dwell time or expected number of stops?
It's good to have the EDI feeds rather than nothing to know that the carrier's providing those updates near real time. Of course, if you have a realtime tracking visibility provider, having those in real time is obviously going to be a little bit better. But knowing the location ping only is not necessarily visibility, it's the knowing where it belongs is the bigger piece of it.
Jason Cannon:
Rather than randomly targeting shipments or going after volume, cargo thieves have zeroed in on high value cargo to get more bang for their buck.
Matt Everson:
High valued goods are obviously the target and anything that can be resold on the market is one thing that's going to come up from time to time as targeted shipments. What I've seen most of is people trying to pretend to be somebody else, somebody pretending to be C.H. Robinson when they're not. And what they're doing similar to a phishing scam is they're saying, hey, ch-robinson.com is their email and somebody books a load with somebody that they really probably shouldn't and they don't know that it's not C.H. Robinson. So managing the URL, managing this is actually a carrier that I'm giving this load to is super important. And I think that's the big piece is how can a shipper ensure that they're moving freight on a carrier or broker that is actually the carrier broker that they intend to be shipping it with. There's been a lot of crackdown on that, but it doesn't change all these phishing scams that you see in the news.
It's one mistake. It's one accident of clicking on something or responding to somebody, thinking it's somebody else. And while people are getting smarter, I think it's still going to be out there. It's something that shippers and frankly brokers as well need to be mindful of, is matching that to a URL that's legitimized versus a fake one.
Matt Cole:
As Matt mentioned before, shipment tracking is nearly ubiquitous across the trucking industry, but just knowing where a load is doesn't necessarily help in preventing theft.
Matt Everson:
So tracking is great, but not every shipper is going to be looking at every shipment at all times. And I think that's the key component. You're not going to be able to do that. So you got to put parameters in place or alerts in place to trigger or flag shipments that are at high risk. So we talked a little bit about what high risk means. We see high valued items being targets. We see items that can be resold on the market being targets. If you can put geofencing around those shipments to have alerts in your inbox to know, hey, it hit this checkpoint at this specific time, it's going to go a long ways. And I think what happens often is you don't put a geofence in place or you don't have an alert that's going to tell you when an event is triggered within the shipment life cycle and you lose track of it and days go by, the customer calls and says, "I didn't get my shipment." And now you're trying to go back in time.
So having alerts in place, having geofencing in place to give you some information upfront is definitely very important.
Jason Cannon:
Trucking companies that are doing things the right way are limited in what they can do to help improve load visibility, but Matt offers some suggestions.
Matt Everson:
It's hard. I think it's reminding the shipper, we only have one URL only except from this URL domain. And where it gets a little complicated is you got carriers with two, three, four, five, six sub-domains. As a carrier, if you can shorten that list, make it easier for the consumer to match what is an actual and true address, it'd be helpful. Using real-time tracking visibility, there's a great tool out there, Trucker Tools. It's actually our sister company. We connect it into Trucker Tools, but we give our customers access to trucker tools. And what it does is it gives you that real-time visibility in real time. And then what our application's able to do is to take those data points, putting in a geo-fencing and provide your team with alerts to help you understand if there's something that seems off, we want to make sure we're tracking that shipment a little bit closer, perhaps as a hot shipment than I would maybe some other shipments.
But I think it's being mindful of the capabilities out there, being mindful, like I said, of the URLs, but having the technology in place to alert your team before it goes out of hand and you don't know what's happening for a number of days. So real-time tracking visibility, using geo-fencing, setting up alerts, and recognizing what shipments are maybe at risk for some type of fraud.
Jason Cannon:
That's it for this week's 10-44. You can read more on ccjdigital.com. While you're there, sign up for our newsletter and stay up to date on the latest in trucking industry news and trends. If you have any questions or feedback, please let us know in the comments below. Don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell for notifications so you can catch us again next week.
