Freight Fraud Awareness Day returns Oct. 14 for its third edition, backed by Verified Carrier, Truckstop, Northland Insurance, Travelers, GenLogs, FreightValidate and Freight Bites, with the campaign pressing transportation professionals to break the silence around cargo crime.

This year's effort centers on education, awareness and advocacy. Organizers want companies to discuss criminal schemes, industry impacts and prevention resources openly — a sharp break from an industry norm in which many victims never disclose what happened to them.

Andrey Drotenko, president of strategic relations at Verified Carrier, framed the day's purpose in a September interview with FreightWaves: "It's a moment to slow down, compare notes, and just act together."

Participants can share incident details without revealing the internal safeguards criminals might exploit. That structure lets actionable intelligence circulate while protecting sensitive procedures. Drotenko compared fraud victims to friends discovering shared struggles — the moment one party realizes, as he put it, "Oh, it's not just me."

How has cargo crime changed?

The tactics have shifted decisively from physical theft to deception.

Gary Thomas, manager of risk and mitigation at SPG Cargo & Logistics, has watched criminals abandon proximity-dependent methods. "We went from a traditional bad guy waiting at the truck stop," he explained. Today, offenders can "digitally manipulate somebody's identity and the supply chain." His prescription: "By working together we hope to bridge that gap."

Retired Los Angeles County Sheriff's Detective Gerardo Pachuca put it bluntly: "Cargo theft has been exploding." Some criminals first learn legitimate operations, then weaponize that knowledge. "They know how to exploit and misuse those loopholes on the dark side of the industry," Pachuca said.

Federal investigators see the same trajectory. The FBI's Memphis Cargo Theft Task Force has warned that cyber-enabled schemes let criminals identify valuable shipments before they arrive for pickup — turning routine freight movements into targeted theft opportunities.

Why does deception beat straight theft for criminals?

Chuck Forsaith, vice president of the Pharmaceutical Cargo Security Coalition, has documented the shift over his career. "Back then it was almost exclusively what we would call straight theft," he said of earlier cases involving physical seizure of merchandise. Today's schemes depend on fraud instead.

For pharmaceutical freight, the change carries a second risk layer. Criminals may bypass required quality controls after taking products, and Forsaith warned "that can significantly impact the integrity of the products once they are reintroduced into a supply chain."

What does the campaign ask of carriers and brokers?

FreightWaves covered the inaugural campaign in October 2024, when early efforts focused on building baseline awareness of transportation scams. The third edition pushes participants toward active exchange: companies can describe what happened without exposing every protective measure, and those accounts may surface threats another business has never encountered.

For shippers and forwarders, the commercial stakes are direct. Identity theft, deceptive pickups and double brokering hit margins and cargo alike, and silence between counterparties leaves the same schemes free to strike repeatedly.

Organizers plan to expand opportunities for professionals to share expertise in coming years, signaling that the campaign intends to outgrow a single-day format.