Cargo Theft: Rising Risk   Part 2
By Advance Business Capital

Anyone surfing the online edition of Landline, the official magazine of the Owner-Operator Association, will find at least one new “tracer alert” each week, often two. These are trailers, sometimes entire trucks, hijacked on the road. It’s a disturbingly regular occurrence and the Landline alerts, which don’t include fleet thefts, represent only a small part of cargo crime.

Drivers, trucking companies, shippers and law enforcement are all alarmed by the rising wave of road robbery. In the past, most truck hijacks were carried out by organized crime, but the down economy has pushed amateurs into the arena as well, especially since stolen goods are more easily fenced to vendors willing to turn a blind eye to cheaply-priced products.

Tracking Technology
The irony, from a criminal’s point of view, is that getting away with road theft isn’t as easy as it used to be. The advent of tracing technology has changed the game. Only a few years ago, thieves’ main obstacle was the theft itself; now they have to contend with tracking devices tucked into the cargo. Typically no larger than a mobile phone, these use a combination of GPS, cellular and radio-frequency technologies to monitor the precise location of an in-transit shipment. When introduced a decade ago, this seemed a foolproof safeguard, since criminals would have to open every box of cargo to find and destroy the tracer.

Unfortunately, for every solution there is a counter-solution. Thieves can now jam GPS systems with imported “black technology.” These are jammers, which put out signals at the same frequency as GPS satellites and effectively block the satellites’ signal. A tracking device can continue to emit, but deaf to satellite input, it no longer “knows” where it is. Its location is unknown.

Bob Cockshott, who heads the location and timing program for the Technology Strategy Board says, "The problem is that the signal from the satellites is extremely weak. It's the equivalent of picking up the light output of a 25-watt bulb on the satellite. That means you only need a jammer with an output of about 2 watts to swamp any signal from the GPS satellites over an area of a few meters."

Black Tech
While illegal, jammers are easily purchased on the internet. A typical “spyware” site advertises one that plugs into a car cigarette lighter for just $49.00. Understandably, security services are aghast at the thought of a few jammers tossed in the back of a van blocking multi-million dollar systems, but at present there is no quick-fix solution.

Tracking devices are still in wide and growing use, since they serve many purposes beyond located stolen goods. However, there are other, more traditional methods of fighting cargo crime. Earlier this year an alliance of security and insurance companies introduced CargoNet, an enormous and sophisticated database to expedite cargo recovery.

CargoNet
Historically, information about stolen cargo has been scattered among a variety of parties: shippers, carriers, insurers and law enforcement. "All of the information now exists, but because it's managed in a fragmented fashion, it gives thieves too much lead time," says Maurizio Scrofani, CargoNet's managing director. The program will aggregate and share data from all participants.

How does CargoNet work in practice? Example: if a load of electronic goods is hijacked in Pennsylvania, relevant information can be immediately available to local, state and federal law enforcement agencies across the country. Or if an empty and abandoned trailer is found on a Nevada side road, the local sheriff’s office can tap into CargoNet not only to find the carrier but details of the theft. CargoNet has its own search engine to facilitate data distribution. Shared information widens the window of criminal apprehension and cargo recovery, one that in the past favored the thieves.

Prevention
Everyone agrees that the best solution to cargo crime is prevention, keeping goods from being stolen in the first place. Unfortunately, in practice this often boils down to polices that place unreasonable demands on drivers. For instance, drivers are often required not to park in “unsecured” areas. Secure areas can sometimes be provided by fleets, but O/Os working as contractors are often on their own when it comes to a ‘safe spot.’ As every trucker knows, tightened budgets have forced several states into shutting down rest stops. At the same time, HOS rules put drivers in the impossible position of choosing which rule to break, driving over HOS or parking in an insecure area.

The fact is, at present there is no grand strategy to solve the rise in cargo theft. Cargo thieves are a unique kind of entrepreneurial class that detects a vulnerability—a niche—and exploits it. A serious effort to defeat road crime can only be achieved by a combination of technological advances, greater cooperation among all parties and private-public creation of secure rest stops. That’s a slow process. In the meantime, you can expect to see a lot more tracer alerts in Landline.

This story was drawn from articles in the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Sun-Times, DCVelocity.com, the CargoNet website, Cygnus Logistics News, GadgetBrando.com, the CargoNet website and the Jason's Law website.

This article is provided as a service for truckers and everyone in the trucking industry by Advance Business Capital. ABC is the first and only factoring service designed by truckers for truckers. We provide innovative financial solutions exclusively to For-Hire truckers and Freight Brokers and are proud to be the first factoring company to receive the P3 (Preferred Platinum Provider) endorsement from the Transportation Intermediaries Association. www.advancebcap.com