The Inside Track: Cargo Theft Only Scratched the Surface at TAPA T1

I returned from the TAPA T1 Cargo Theft Summit in Atlanta recently, and still can't stop thinking about the same question that was rattling around in my head on the drive there: how is it that the freight industry has stacked up the biggest arsenal of cargo theft tools, vendors, conferences, and security professionals we've ever seen—yet theft and fraud rates keep climbing year after year anyway? 

Something has to be broken in how all those pieces fit together, and I went to TAPA T1 to hear what the people doing the work every day thought was going wrong.

I had the privilege of moderating the closing-day panel at the conference, which gave me an hour on stage with Keith Puckett from Microsoft, Al Salem from DSV, Scott Parry from Parsyl, Danielle Spinelli from GenLogs, and Sgt. Summer Weathers from the California Highway Patrol. 

Rather than letting the conversation drift into the usual recap of how bad things have gotten, I challenged the group to dig deeper and focus on solutions: what we need to do to start moving cargo theft in the other direction. Today. 

If you've got freight moving this week and you're hoping nothing happens to it, you should probably keep reading.

More Tech, More Theft, Same Problem

That disconnect between what the industry has and what it's genuinely doing with it was sitting in the room before the panel even started.

TAPA attendance this year was the highest I've ever seen. The exhibit floor was loaded with every kind of tool you could want for fighting cargo theft—all of it behind a logo and a demo station. Trackers, geofencing, carrier ID verification, load board fraud detection, predictive analytics. If somebody was selling it, somebody on that floor had a booth for it.

And yet theft rates still climbed over the last 12 months. Needless to say, if this were a tech gap, we’d have closed it a long time ago.

Truth be told, what we have is an integration problem, and you can feel it the second you started walking the exhibit hall floor. Twenty vendors, every one of them good at a specific piece of the puzzle, and almost none of them talking to each other about how those pieces are supposed to fit together for the shipper standing in the middle trying to make it all work.

That’s the whole reason why I wanted to put a panel together in the first place.

Collaboration Gets Talked About Every Year and Yet Hasn’t Been Fixed

On to the panel. The first thing the group landed on is the same thing the industry agrees on every year yet always overlooks: cargo theft rings are coordinated in ways the defense side of this business simply isn't. The bad guys share intel, methods, and fences for the freight after it disappears. The legitimate side mostly works in silos and hopes for the best.

A shipper will buy trackers from one company, a vetting service from another, and an insurance policy from a third, and none of those three are sharing what they each know about the same load. The people stealing freight often understand that disconnect better than the people moving it do.

Sgt. Weathers said something that stuck with me. By the time a stolen load case hits her desk, the information her team needs to recover it usually already exists in some database somewhere. It just lives across five different companies with no real workflow for getting it into her hands while the case is hot. So the load sits while everybody catches up over email.

You can't fix that with a product. You fix it by building an ecosystem in which shippers, LSPs, insurance, tech, and law enforcement share what they know the second they know it.

We're not close to that yet, and the criminals are taking full advantage of it.

Layered Defense Beats Any Single Tool

The second takeaway flowed pretty naturally out of the first one. If no single company can solve cargo theft on its own, no single tool inside any one company can either.

The best defense is a stack of overlapping controls. Identity checks on every new carrier, document verification at every handoff, seal checks at pickup and delivery, geofencing on the load, door alerts on the trailer, and a rehearsed escalation playbook sitting on the ops desk for when something goes amiss. A bad actor has to beat all of that on the same load—on the same day—to walk away with anything.

Al from DSV made the point that this only holds up if the procedures are routine. If they're optional, people skip them when they're tired or behind. If they're considered to always be part of the job, they happen on autopilot. Cargo theft chases the path of least resistance every time, so the entire goal is to make it so the freight isn't worth the trouble.

Most of the Industry Has No Clue How Bad It's Gotten

Here's the one that bothers me the most. The people who showed up to TAPA already know cargo theft is at crisis levels. They know what double-brokering scams look like in 2026, they know about identity spoofing on load boards, and they know what GenLogs, Parsyl, CargoNet, and a dozen other services can do for them.

The people who didn't show up to TAPA still picture cargo theft the way it looked in 2005, where somebody breaks a lock at a truck stop in the middle of the night. They have no idea a fraudster can stand up a fake MC number on a Monday, win a load on a board Tuesday morning, repaint a tractor by lunch, and have your freight three states away before dispatch realizes anything is off.

Danielle made this point on the panel, and I think she nailed it. The biggest thing those of us in the know can do for the rest of the industry is just talk about it. Talk to your carriers, talk to your shippers, and talk to your customers. Cargo theft thrives when people don’t know what they don't know.

Tech Should Make Your People Better, Not Replace Them

I sell tech solutions for a living, so this one might sound funny coming from me. At the end of the day, your people are what stand between your freight and the people trying to take it. The tech we sell at Tive is there to make your team faster and sharper, and to free them up to spend their time on the high-stakes calls where their judgment is what saves the load. The fraud that slips through is almost always the fraud that nobody bothered to pick up a phone and double-check on before the load moved.

The panel was unanimous on this, and I felt it in the room. What really holds up against cargo theft is knowing the people you work with on a real level. The kind of working relationship where you can call somebody after hours to ask whether the load tender that just hit your inbox actually came from them, and it doesn't feel awkward at all because you talk to them all the time anyway.

Tracking Without Context is Just Forensics

I deal with this one every day at Tive, so let me be upfront about the bias and tell you what's real. A tracker by itself is better than no tracker.  

What changes the recovery window from days to minutes is the context wrapped around the tracker. The tracking system you choose has to know what that specific load is supposed to be doing, including the route, the stops, the dwell times, the temperature it should be maintaining, and when the doors should and shouldn't be opened.

The second your actual shipment starts diverging from the planned shipment, somebody gets pinged in real time. Ops sees it, your security team sees it, your law enforcement contact sees it, and the load gets intercepted before it's a hundred miles down the road and being loaded on to a different truck.

Sgt. Weathers put it in her own words on stage: the more context she has the moment a load is reported missing, the faster she can move. Cargo theft recovery is a fight against the clock.

Three Quotes With Which I Closed the Panel

I closed out my hour on stage with three lines that have been sitting in my head for a while. None of them has anything to do with cargo theft on the surface, but every one of them has shaped how I think about this work.

Greg Maddux on Having a Plan

The first came from a conversation I had with MLB Hall of Fame pitcher Greg Maddux at spring training back in March. Coming from a guy who played minor league ball himself, I can tell you Maddux thinks about pitching the way most of us wish we thought about our jobs. What he told me boiled down to this: success is having a plan where the odds favor you, knowing how to implement that plan, and then executing. The order matters. Most operations I see swing for the fences on execution, and wonder why the same losses keep coming around.

Sun Tzu on Strategy vs. Tactics

The second is Sun Tzu. Strategy without tactics is the slowest way to victory, and tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. Most cargo theft programs I look at are tactics with no strategy. A device here, a service there, a policy bolted on after the last bad week, and none of it adds up to a real defense.

The One I've Never Found an Author For

"In the moment of truth, you will not rise to the level of your expectations. You will fall to the level of your preparedness." The night a load goes dark is not the night you build the response plan.

What I Came Home With

There's no silver bullet for cargo theft, and anybody selling you one is making it up. The progress I saw at TAPA T1 was real, but there's still a whole lot of daylight between what the best operations are doing and what most of the industry is running day to day.

What actually works is a fabric: tech, networks, people, SOPs, and law enforcement woven together tightly enough that four or five things would have to fail at the same time for a load to disappear, and nobody gets there overnight.

TIve is the foundational piece of that fabric. Our real-time tracking gives you the contextual alerting I talked about on the panel, including smart route deviations, prolonged stops, door events, and temperature and light anomalies—all tied to the specific load and surfaced the second something looks off. Pair that with real-time shipment visibility across your full lane network, and your team and your law enforcement contacts get a real shot at acting while the load is still recoverable, instead of writing it up after the fact.

Tive isn’t trying to replace your carriers, your SOPs, or anybody else in your cargo theft defense. We are the thread that ties the rest of it together.

If your team is rethinking how it handles cargo theft this year, that's a conversation worth having. Get started with Tive, and let's talk.