The cargo most likely to be stolen in Canada is not the most valuable. It is the kind that cannot be traced, according to Daniel Kerr (pictured right), cargo and heavy equipment theft program coordinator at Équité Association.
Food and beverage have sat at the top of the list for years, Kerr said, for a simple reason: it carries nothing to identify it. "You've got to think a lot of cargo doesn't have identifying numbers on it, such as your food and beverage, your building materials, your personal hygiene, your metals," he said. "They're very hard to trace."
He pointed to a recent case: a full trailer of avocados stolen a couple of weeks earlier. Once a load like that is intercepted, the thief moves it fast – to a warehouse, or backed up to another trailer to be offloaded on the spot, the goods almost impossible to recover. "It could be offloaded into a couple of different straight trucks. And once it's off that stolen trailer, it's going to be very hard to identify – there are no numbers on it," Kerr said.
Metals follow the same logic, Kerr said, because they convert to cash almost immediately. "You bring it to a recycling plant, and it's gone by morning," he said. Meat and other food products are no harder to move: "Very easy to repack and sell, to offload it."
Sid Kingma (pictured left), director of investigations for Western Canada at Équité, said much of this theft is opportunistic rather than targeted – a numbers game more than a hit list. "It's like the scam callers – they make thousands upon thousands of calls until they find someone on the phone," Kingma said. "The same with these guys. They put out thousands and thousands of bids."
The thieves are not particular about what they catch, he said. "Someone bites, and whatever that load is, there's going to be some value in it," Kingma said. Food and groceries simply come up most often, he added, for a mundane reason. "That's probably what's traveling the most and the most common type of load out there."
The exception is seasonal. Around Christmas, Kerr said, electronics and whatever the year's top toy happens to be start moving in volume, and the loads follow. Last year it was Halloween candy and products; around Valentine's Day, it was chocolate. "It depends on the time of year," he said. Electronics and cell phones draw deliberate targeting year-round, he added, because the payoff is higher – though so is the risk, since those loads tend to carry more security.
Defending against all of this has changed as the theft has, Kerr said. The old protections were physical – hard devices fitted to the trailer itself: glad hands to lock out the air brake system, landing gear locks, kingpin locks. Those still have a place for basic asset protection, he said, but they are no longer enough on their own. The emphasis now has shifted toward electronics.
The newer defences are about visibility, Kerr said – knowing the moment a load goes off-plan. He described layering tracking onto the trailer and, for high-value freight, into the cargo itself: geofencing that flags when a load strays off its route, motion detectors, and light sensors that fire a notification to a phone the moment a trailer's doors are opened. A refrigerated load can be watched by temperature, he added, so an unexpected door opening registers as a change on the readout.
Kingma said Équité's role in all of this is to turn what its investigators see into something insurers can act on.
"Our job is to help our member insurance companies with the data – saying these are the types of things that happen, these are the types of loads, these are the areas," he said. That intelligence becomes a prevention tool at the point of underwriting.
"It's almost like an education process, a theft prevention process for our members to pass along to the industry," Kingma said. "It's our job to say to our member companies that do insure these loads, these are the risks we're seeing. And then they pass that on to the industry itself."
