Fewer Thefts, Bigger Losses: How and Why Shipping Fraud Now Hides in the Invoice

Two shipping fraud statistics look odd at first, but together they explain a lot about where fraud is heading. Verisk CargoNet announced in August 2026 that cargo thefts across the U.S. and Canada fell 26% in Q2 2026 compared to the prior year. The announcement also noted that cargo theft losses more than doubled over the same period. 

That means the number of cargo theft incidents are falling while the total financial losses from cargo theft have increased significantly. Translation: Bad actors are working bigger jobs so that they can work fewer.

Their methods are designed to look like ordinary business on paper. Often, the first sign you’ll see is a single line on a freight bill. 

What 2026’s Cargo Theft Statistics Reveal

Digging deeper into Verisk CargoNet’s numbers: There were 677 cargo theft incidents in Q2 of 2026 (14% less than Q1), but those incidents involved $304.6 million in cargo (compared to $135.7 million in Q2 of 2025). Among thefts with a reported cargo value, the average loss was $564,009, a figure driven up by a small number of multimillion-dollar heists.

Keith Lewis, Verisk’s vice president of operations, put it like this: “Lower incident volume should not be mistaken for lower risk.”

In an April 2026 public service announcement, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center said estimated cargo theft losses across the U.S. and Canada reached nearly $725 million in 2025. That represented a 60% jump from 2024. Throughout 2025, thefts continued to rise in number, making the drop in incident counts a story that unfolded almost entirely in 2026.

Overhaul’s data points to the same trend. Total incidents in its Q1 2026 report fell 6% from a year earlier. Deceptive pickups, where thieves use fake identities and carrier impersonation to get a load released to them, rose 31%, FreightWaves reported.

The methods bad actors use have changed just as dramatically in recent months.

Why Physical Security Stopped Being Enough

A locked yard and a sealed trailer don’t help much when the thief shows up with the right paperwork. Increasingly, that’s exactly how bad actors are gaining access to freight.

The FBI’s April PSA, titled “Cyber-Enabled Strategic Cargo Theft Surging,” outlines this common theft playbook:

1. Spoofed broker emails carrying malware links
2. Compromised carrier accounts used to post fake loads
3. Criminals posing as real companies to change FMCSA contact details and insurance records
4. Double brokering with “manipulated bills of lading” and rerouted destinations

CargoNet’s Q2 release names business email compromise (BEC) as “the primary access point for many of the quarter’s most sophisticated cargo theft schemes.” BEC goes beyond just the freight industry. BEC-related losses topped $3 billion last year, according to the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report. Only investment fraud cost victims more. The Association for Financial Professionals’ 2026 Payments Fraud and Control Survey indicates that 74% of organizations experienced BEC in 2025.

Once the freight is gone, criminals launder its records across subsequent stops. Scott Cornell of SPG Cargo & Logistics, who chairs TAPA Americas, told FreightWaves in September that stolen loads now move through cross-docks and warehouses, picking up a new bill of lading and a new seal at each stop. The goods get re-described as “electronics,” then as freight of all kinds. In one case he described, stolen headphones turned up in Europe about a week later.

None of this activity raises red flags at the dock, which is the point. When fraud runs through your own accounts, the first evidence usually shows up on the invoice: an account that suddenly ships more, a service nobody ordered, or a return that shouldn’t exist.

Shipping Fraud vs. Freight Fraud vs. Parcel Fraud

“Shipping fraud” is the umbrella term for any scheme that uses the movement of goods to steal cargo, money, or both. In practice, it splits along the same lines as your shipping spend, but freight fraud and parcel fraud leave different traces.

Freight fraud targets truckload and LTL shipments that move through brokers and carriers. It’s what the CargoNet and FBI numbers above measure: fictitious pickups, double brokering, carrier impersonation, and email compromise used to redirect loads. CargoNet logged 158 fictitious pickups in Q2 2026 alone. The target is usually the cargo itself.

Parcel fraud happens inside your small-package carrier accounts. Criminals take over an account, ship on it, change ship-to addresses, or abuse your returns service. Whether or not goods go missing, the cost lands on your invoice, because you pay for what ships on your account. Most of the cases below are parcel fraud, including the hijacked UPS accounts in our eyewear case.

Where we fit: To identify both types of fraud, Intelligent Audit analyzes your invoices. Our Freight Audit & Recovery checks freight bills across 150+ audit points for any mode, and Parcel Audit & Recovery connects directly to the top carriers. DeepDetectAI™ looks across both freight and parcel invoices, learning what normal looks like for you so it can flag what doesn’t fit.

4 Fraud Patterns You’ll Spot on the Invoice Before Anywhere Else

A rules-based freight audit answers this question: Does this charge match the contract? The problem is that fraud can match the contract perfectly. An audit can only detect fraud by looking at patterns. These four common patterns come from cases DeepDetectAI has flagged:

• A service you’ve never used: A global eyewear manufacturer suddenly showed a $10,000 spike in a return service it hadn’t used before. That was the first indication of a scheme that grew past $1 million (more on that below). A high-end fashion brand saw a similar signal: first-time use of costly expedited services.
  
  
• Returns that don’t match what went out: One UPS shipper account showed a steep rise in international returns out of Mexico. The numbers didn’t match its outbound volume to Mexico. The returns carried a high cost per shipment and went to residential addresses. Undetected, the scheme could have cost $500,000 a year.
  
  
• Activity from somewhere you don’t ship: A wireless-industry shipper with $24 million in annual shipping spend got an alert on sudden high-handling shipments to residential receivers, coming out of Tennessee, a state it had never seen at that volume. It turned out to be a hijacked account: a small business was moving unauthorized product on the shipper’s dime, with a potential exposure of $218,000 a year. In another case, a sudden spike in UPS Next Day Air across multiple accounts, much of it Not Previously Billed fees, uncovered unauthorized usage. More than $1 million was recovered.
  
  
• Charges billed to the wrong party (or paid twice): A global manufacturer started seeing an Additional Classification Fee billed to a non-authorized brokerage account, with duplicate payment exposure across ACH and EDI. DeepDetectAI surfaced $220,000 in abnormal spend early and kept the duplicate payments from recurring.

In each case, it was the pattern deviation (not just the invoice) that indicated fraud.

Case Study: The $10,000 Spike That Turned Into $1 Million in Fraud

We shared the story of the eyewear manufacturer above in a recent case study. Fraudsters bought glasses, started returns, swapped the barcodes, and shipped back boxes of unrelated items that weighed about the same. The boxes were signed for, so the returns were processed without the real merchandise ever coming back. We flagged the $10,000 spike in the unfamiliar return service and alerted the company.

The manufacturer did not take action at first. The fraudsters then compromised the company’s UPS accounts, changed ship-to addresses, and used the return service to move stolen goods from Mexico into the U.S. The company paid for the shipping. By the time the manufacturer acted, it had detected more than $1 million in fraudulent activity, and the FBI had opened an investigation.

Had the company acted on that first alert, the fraud would have been limited to $10,000.

What Invoice Fraud Detection Does That Rules-Based Audit Can’t

A traditional audit compares each invoice to a rate table and a list of rules. That’s how you catch an overcharge. But as we’ve written before, a charge can be correct on paper and still be wrong.

Rather than asking if the charge is correct, DeepDetectAI starts by asking: “Is this normal for us?” Dr. Brian Pollack, our Chief Product Officer, recently described the approach like this: “When we implement DeepDetectAI, we start by establishing a client’s historical baseline. If something deviates — a new charge code, a weight discrepancy, a route shift — our tool flags it.”

DeepDetectAI, the system Pollack’s team built, works in four steps. 

1. First, it digests your entire shipping history until it knows what normal looks like for you.
2. Then it keeps watch in real time. A sudden rush on a service that’s rarely used gets flagged, for example. 
3. You get an alert, interactive charts, and an analyst from our team who walks you through what happened, where, and why. 
4. The system continually learns from new data, so it catches things faster over time.

Across our client base, DeepDetectAI has logged millions in confirmed fraud detections. It works from a large dataset: we audited more than 2.1 billion shipments last year. This summer, DeepDetectAI was named AI-based Logistics Solution of the Year in the 2026 AI Breakthrough Awards and was featured in FreightWaves’ 2026 AI Excellence in Supply Chain Awards.

What This Means for Transportation, Loss Prevention, and Finance Leaders

If you’re the one who’s financially responsible for freight spend, keep these three things in mind as you think about fraud and how to combat it.

1. The cost of waiting compounds. In the eyewear case, the first fraud alert could have stopped the scheme at $10,000. It ended up totaling more than $1 million.
   
   
2. Fraud on your account is your bill. In the eyewear and wireless cases, the thieves shipped on the shipper’s own accounts, and the shipper paid. Getting money back means escalating to the carrier.
   
   
3. Somebody needs to own the alerts you receive. If freight invoices sit with accounts payable, the carrier relationship with logistics, and fraud with security, a signal can get lost between those three groups. That’s why you should decide in advance who’s ultimately responsible for fraud alerts.

5 Questions to Ask Your Freight Audit and Payment Provider About Fraud

When you evaluate a freight audit and payment provider, ask these five questions:

1. Do you look for anomalies in our shipping patterns, or only check each charge against the contract?
   
   
2. When something looks wrong, how fast do we hear? Has a person on your side looked at it before it reaches us?
   
   
3. Show us a fraud case you actually caught. What was the signal that tipped you off?
   
   
4. Do you monitor every account and carrier we use, including returns and inbound?
   
   
5. After the alert, what do you handle? Disputes, documentation, carrier contact?

Any provider that’s built to stop modern fraud will have comprehensive and authoritative answers to these questions.

FAQs

How much did cargo theft cost in 2025?

Nearly $725 million in the U.S. and Canada, per the FBI’s April 2026 PSA. Confirmed thefts rose 18% in 2025, and the average theft increased 36% to $273,990. The trend has shifted since: Verisk CargoNet counted 26% fewer thefts in Q2 2026 than a year earlier, but losses more than doubled to $304.6 million.

Can a freight audit catch fraud?

A rules-based audit usually can’t, because fraudulent charges are often billed at the correct rate. DeepDetectAI can. It flags new services, new locations, and volume shifts that don’t fit your history, on parcel and freight invoices alike.

What is carrier account hijacking?

It’s when someone takes over a shipper’s carrier account and ships on it, so the shipper pays the bill. In one case we caught, a small business used a hijacked wireless shipper’s account to move its own product out of Tennessee.

See what your invoices aren’t telling you

If a $10,000 spike showed up on your parcel or freight bill next week, would anyone notice? We can help you find out. Talk to our team about freight audit, parcel audit, or both, with DeepDetectAI watching for the patterns that rules miss. 

To see real cases first, watch Brian Pollack, Chief Product Officer, Hannah Testani, CEO, and Megan Bishop, Chief Commercial Officer, walk through them in the on-demand webinar AI in Action: Catching Fraud, Errors, and Glitches Before They Cost Millions.