Steal Smarter, Not Harder

Happy Friday. Cargo theft incidents fell 26% in Q2. Losses still jumped 124.5%, driven by copper, data center hardware, and stolen carrier identities.

Plus:

• Reefers Are Holding Up

• FMCSA Just Pulled 5 More ELDs

• Teamsters Sue Over Self-Driving Trucks

💡 QUESTION OF THE DAY:

The average value of a stolen load jumped ___% year over year in Q2.

🍳 WHAT’S COOKIN’ IN FREIGHT

🥶 Reefers Are Holding Up. Reefer spot linehaul, which excludes fuel, eased to $2.65 a mile this week, down 2.6% from the prior week. But the load-to-truck ratio tells the real story: 19.38, up from 11.36 a year ago and the tightest of the three equipment types right now. Spot is also running $0.16 per mile above contract, a gap that's held since the spread flipped in December 2025, ending a 44-month run in which contract carried the premium. Rates are still 37.7% above year-ago levels and 28.5% above the nine-year seasonal average, per DAT iQ. The 35-day forecast has spot easing only slightly, to $2.62 by early September.

🚫 FMCSA Just Pulled 5 More ELDs. Moonlight ELD alone was running in more than 1,500 trucks across 300-plus companies before the FMCSA revoked it on Thursday, along with four others: HGRS ELD, Highest ELD, Truckford ELD, and Sparkle ELD, two of which (HGRS and Highest) share one provider. The batch brings FMCSA's total ELD removals since January 2025 to 95. Carriers running any of the five have until Oct. 6 to swap to a compliant device. Moonlight's provider, UZB2USA, confirmed the revocation but wouldn't say whether it has been in contact with the FMCSA. Chameleon ELDs are a growing enforcement target that we've already covered; you can read more about them here.

🤖 Teamsters Sue Over Self-Driving Trucks. More than 200,000 truck driver jobs, plus an unknown number of owner-operators, are at the center of a lawsuit Teamsters California filed against the state DMV on August 5. The suit claims the DMV used a fast-track process meant for regulations with first-year costs or benefits under $50 million, skipping a required public study on self-driving trucks. Those April 2026 rules opened AV testing to manufacturers statewide. To use that fast-track process, the DMV had to certify the number of jobs the rule would cost. Its answer: zero. The suit argues that number is false, given the jobs at stake, and asks the court to void the rule.

PRESENTED BY FREIGHTFLEX

Is Your Brokerage Actually Prepared?

You've seen the headlines. Everyone has a take on what broker liability looks like now. Almost nobody has an answer.

Freight Flex's answer is Michael Grace. The former NTG and Highway compliance leader joined as Chief Compliance Officer, putting compliance, safety and insurance under one roof so Freight Flex agents can focus on what they do best. Selling freight and serving customers.

In his latest podcast appearance, Michael gets into how the liability landscape is shifting, what it means for carrier selection and insurance costs, and how Freight Flex keeps its agents protected.

Cargo Theft Fell 26%. Losses Grew 124%.

Investigators outside Chicago found a trailer containing $300,000 worth of stolen copper wire in June. It was riding on license plates that had also been stolen, a separate theft, bolted onto this one.

The guy who dropped it off had left another trailer at the same yard the week before, this one loaded with $1 million in data center equipment stolen out of Florida.

Why Losses Went Up While Thefts Went Down

Copper and data center hardware are the two categories behind why losses spiked despite fewer incidents.

Verisk's CargoNet logged 677 cargo theft incidents in Q2, down 26% from a year ago; non-delivery schemes and thefts of unattended trailers both fell, especially in California and Texas.

Estimated losses hit $304.6 million anyway, more than double the $135.7 million recorded in Q2 2025.

"Lower incident volume should not be mistaken for lower risk," said Keith Lewis, vice president of operations at Verisk CargoNet.

What's Actually Getting Stolen Now

Metal theft rose from 54 incidents to 80, with copper still the primary target, along with aluminum, nickel, and tungsten.

Enterprise computer and networking equipment, such as RAM modules, storage drives, and cryptocurrency mining hardware, now moves as ordinary dry freight, worth millions per load, without the security that such value should require.

Everything else mostly went down. Combined thefts of beverages and mixed grocery products fell by 36 events, and auto parts, tires, supplements, protein products, and over-the-counter meds also saw substantial declines. Seafood was the one exception, up 11 events.

A Password Beats a Crowbar

Whoever took the Elk Grove trailers had to physically get into that truck yard. CargoNet's data shows that most of Q2's biggest losses didn't require that step: business email compromise is now the top access point for the most sophisticated schemes.

A hacked account hands criminals shipment details, contact lists, and TMS logins, enough to impersonate a broker or carrier and redirect a load.

CargoNet's own incident classifications show traditional theft of unattended trailers dropping from 488 to 378 events in Q2. Fictitious pickup schemes, which start with a hacked inbox or a stolen carrier identity, barely moved: 165 down to 158.

The same report puts the average loss on a theft with a reported value at $564,009 in Q2, pulled up by a handful of seven-figure hits, up 177% from $203,586 in Q2 2025.

PRESENTED BY TRACKFLO

On May 14, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II that brokers can be sued directly for negligent hiring. Vetting is only half the fight. Once a load is booked, every call, email, text, and stop update becomes part of the record a court will want.

TrackFlo catches it all automatically, from booking through delivery. No manual logging, no digging through someone's individual messages.

Post-Montgomery, "we think we called them" won't cut it. A timestamped record will.

 🌎 AROUND THE FREIGHT WEB

🚨 13 Residents Displaced After Semi Crash. A semi-truck jumped the curb and slammed into a Panorama City apartment building, displacing 13 residents and sending two people to the hospital. What the driver told reporters afterward is stranger than the crash itself.

📉 $1.58 Billion In Revenue, Still a $24 Million Loss. Uber Freight's revenue hit $1.583 billion this quarter, up 25% year over year and 18.3% sequentially, but it still recorded a $24 million loss.

🚻 Nature Calls, New Hampshire Answers. Starting next week, New Hampshire businesses can't turn away a truck driver asking to use the restroom. Gas stations and employee-only bathrooms are still exempt.

🛡️ RXO's Pitch: We Saw This Coming. RXO's CFO says the company won't let a Conditional-rated carrier into its network at all, and requires 90 days of active authority before any carrier can serve a customer.

💸 Forward Air's Record Quarter Came With a $244 Million Catch. Forward Air posted record revenue of $673 million and still logged a $201.3 million operating loss, tied to a $244 million writedown from a customer diversifying away.

🚛 A Marketplace With No Strangers Allowed. LoadBetter launched a private freight marketplace, allowing shippers and brokers to post loads, collect offers, and award freight within their existing carrier networks.

🎣 THE FREIGHT CAVIAR CORNER

Freight Gong Friday is FreightCaviar's weekly live show, hosted (almost) every Friday from 8–10 AM CST by Paul-Bernard Jaroslawski and Reed Loustalot. Each week, we bring on operators, analysts, and executives from across the industry for unfiltered conversations about what is actually happening in freight.

This Freight Gong Friday, we are joined by Jett McCandless, Founder & CEO at project44, Natan Reddy, Principal at Ironspring Ventures, and Brad Perling, Co-Founder & CEO at Bitfreighter, as our special guests.

Tune in here. Presented by Epay Manager.

😂 FREIGHT HUMOR

🎧 THE FREIGHT CAVIAR PODCAST

Founder & CEO at Kovin Group, Serge Raducan, joined Paul-Bernard Jaroslawski on the FreightCaviar Podcast to discuss how Moldova became a hub for U.S. dispatching, the challenges of running U.S. freight operations from overseas, whether AI will replace dispatchers, and more.

Watch it on YouTube, or listen to the full episode on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.