🚛Cargo Thieves Steal $100M in Data Center Gear Since June

Your next server shipment might get hijacked in transit

Cargo thieves have made off with more than $100 million in data center equipment since June, and they're doing it with hacking, not crowbars. The crew breaks into freight brokers' accounts on shipment-listing sites, posts fake loads to lure real carrier bids, and then takes over trucking companies' accounts to bid on genuine shipments. Sometimes a legit driver shows up to collect the cargo with no idea it's a scam. Other times the thieves use AI-generated fake driver's licenses to get their own people hired. If you ship or receive hardware, this is your problem. Servers, fiber-optic cable, memory chips, copper wire, and bitcoin miners are the targets. Anyone with a freight broker login or a logistics vendor relationship should treat credentials like production secrets, enable MFA, and audit who can accept bids. The bigger risk is the chain of custody: spoofed GPS coordinates meant the monitoring dashboards showed nothing wrong while trucks were being emptied. The numbers are ugly. Cook County Sheriff's investigators estimated two Illinois loads held $300,000 in copper spools and about $1 million in modular power equipment. One California-to-Texas shipment of server rack components was worth roughly $10 million, and a Georgia-bound trailer carried $13 million in servers. In at least two of the largest thefts, thieves took out off-duty cop escorts with unmarked sedans. Nearly two dozen incidents have hit California, Texas, and Utah since 2025.