Plus:

• Copper, Chips, and Stolen Plates

• Drones Spike Ocean Rates

• Prime Is Suing the IRS Over Reefer Fuel

Trivia of the Day:

Today's Newsletter is Brought To You by: FreightCaviar Print

🍳 What's Cookin' In Freight

📦 Copper, Chips, and Stolen Plates. Cook County deputies pulled more than $1.3 million in stolen freight out of two semi-trailers sitting at a truck yard in Elk Grove Township, Illinois. One trailer was tracked from Pine Hill, Alabama, packed with $300,000 in copper wire and bearing Indiana plates reported stolen in Wisconsin. The other was lifted out of Jacksonville, Florida, holding $1 million in data center equipment. The same guy dropped both trailers at the same yard a week apart, and the yard owner had no clue what he was sitting on. Cargo theft keeps drifting toward high-value freight: copper, electronics, and data center gear, because it moves fast for cash. The trailers got found because they had trackers.

💥 Drones Spike Ocean Rates. Container rates hit their highest level since September 2024, Drewry's index jumped 5% to $4,166 per 40-foot box, more than double that of late February. Iran's Revolutionary Guard drone struck a tanker on the one Hormuz corridor the US Navy had called safe, the second hit in 48 hours. With the central channel blocked by roughly 80 mines, carriers are rerouting around the Cape of Africa, adding up to 14 days to a voyage. Maersk is eating $500 million a month in fuel. The Shanghai-to-New York rate is now $7,149 a box.

🧊 Prime Is Suing the IRS Over Reefer Fuel. Prime Inc is suing the IRS for $11 million. Filed in federal court on June 16 to recover $11,016,644 in fuel excise tax it paid between 2018 and 2021 on the diesel that runs its trailer refrigeration units, arguing that fuel spins a compressor and never propels a truck down a highway, so it should never have carried the 24.3-cent-per-gallon highway tax. The IRS already denied Prime's earlier administrative claims and an appeal, which is why one of the largest reefer carriers in the country is now fighting it out in the Western District of Missouri. The same off-highway Fuel Tax Credit covers reefer fuel for the owner-operator pulling a single trailer, and most of them have never filed the form to get it back.

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Congress vs. The Night Shift

On June 22, Reps. Greg Steube and Dave Taylor introduced the GHOSTRUCK Act (HR9369). It would require that any edit to an ELD record be made by a carrier, dispatcher, or driver physically located in North America, to prevent foreign dispatchers from altering hours-of-service logs "from halfway around the world." It's the first bill to reach a layer of the industry that left the country years ago.

The carriers aren't hiding the offshore desk. They're advertising it.

$4,300 in Texas, $450 in Mohali

Serbia's largest job board currently lists dozens of open dispatcher positions with US fleets. Naissus Inc. is seeking a senior dispatcher for its 50-truck fleet at $2,000–$4,000 per month. Mad Duck LLC is paying $2,000–$5,000 net to run US lanes out of Belgrade. Those are the senior posts; the typical experienced seat runs $1,300–$2,000. The pay is quoted in dollars and euros; the shifts run in the afternoon and overnight, Belgrade time, which is daytime in the US.

India is the floor. Atlin Transport in Chandigarh is hiring an overnight dispatcher for flatbed and cross-border loads at ₹30,000–₹50,000 (approx. $317-$529) per month; Skylane Logistics in Mohali wants a US-process dispatcher at ₹30,000–₹40,000 per month. The listings cluster across Punjab (Mohali, Chandigarh, Sangrur, Ludhiana) at ₹24,000–₹50,000 a month.

The math is the whole story. A starting US dispatcher salary is around $52,000 a year, or roughly $4,300 a month. The same seat costs around $1,500 in Serbia and around $450 in India. 

Dispatch Runs Free

FMCSA spent the last year on the driver side: thousands pulled from service over English proficiency, 550 CDL mills shut, non-domiciled licenses frozen. None of it touched dispatch. GHOSTRUCK would require ELD edits to be made from inside North America, but it's narrow: it covers who can edit a log, not the outsourcing itself, and it's a bill, not a rule yet.

Most of these operations are straightforward outsourcing: cheaper labor, US hours, fluent English. The same cheap, hard-to-trace structure is what chameleon-carrier and double-broker rings run on.

Many of these operations are legitimate, and the location alone proves nothing. What flags a problem is the carrier's authority and safety record, not where the dispatcher sits.

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 🌎 Around the Freight Web

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🚛 A Tesla Semi for 50 Grand? Qualifying in-state small fleets can now combine two California rebate programs to drop a Tesla Semi from about $290,000 to roughly $50,000

🤝 PLS Buys Ocean Forwarder AGL. PLS Logistics has acquired Massachusetts forwarder The AGL Group, a 76-person shop with a 600-plus partner network, adding drayage, ocean, and customs brokerage to its domestic truckload and LTL book.

📦 USPS Might Stiff Its Truckers. The Postmaster says USPS could default on payments to its trucking partners. If you haul for the post office, read this before you book the next load.

🪙 They Stole a Truckload of Dimes. A Philadelphia man got 94 months in federal prison for an organized theft crew that broke into parked trailers with bolt cutters and made off with frozen crab legs, Samsung TVs, and more than $230,000 in newly minted U.S. dimes hauled out in trash cans over a seven-month run.

🗣️ English Test, Out-of-Service Risk. FMCSA is moving to update its English-proficiency out-of-service rule. Thousands of drivers are already getting pulled.

Freight Humor

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