Today’s cargo thief doesn’t wear a mask. He wears an employee badge. Pay attention, Supply Chain Risk Community. This serious problem is not on the radar of many organizations.
⚡49,366 attacks on European supply chains in just 273 days.
⚡8,2 billion euros in annual cargo theft losses across the EU.
⚡+438% increase in cargo theft across Europe within a single year.
These are not numbers from a crime novel. They come from TAPA incident reports and industry analysis by trans.info. The real problem runs deeper than the numbers themselves. When we talk about supply chain risk, we default to geopolitical, insolvency, and environmental risks. The last mile and the human factor rarely make the priority list. That is exactly where a risk with real financial impact and long-term reputational damage is quietly building.
Cargo theft: the problem isn’t the thief. It’s his invisibility. Today’s perpetrators operate from the inside, not the outside. As drivers. As warehouse staff. As dispatchers. As executives of so-called fake carriers. They show up with documentation, genuine or forged, and they know the processes. In some cases, they helped design them.
76% of cargo theft in logistics in 2024 happened directly out of vehicles.
The real problem is structural. Once someone has built insider knowledge inside a supply chain, they can carry that knowledge across employer changes, carrier changes, and new identities. Site bans stay local. Background checks filter only the coarsest cases. Blacklist sharing, in its previous form, has been unlawful since GDPR.
And conventional biometric one-to-one checks only confirm whether a person matches the credential they present, not whether that same person is already active in the system under a different identity.
The result: repeat offenders regain access to security-sensitive positions despite prior red flags, identity changes, and employer changes. Undetected.
What’s needed isn’t another document. It’s a different logic. One that starts with the person, not the paperwork, applied continuously, across company lines, and in a privacy-compliant way. The entire supply chain industry and retailers are currently working on solutions to this exact problem.
Anyone looking into it should consider: Drivers Trust by Green Convenience. Established global freight carriers and retailers trust Drivers Trust
⬇️ Download the whitepaper. https://www.driver-trust.de/hubfs/whitepaper_handlungsbedarf_frachtkriminalitaet_mehrfachtaeter_identitaetsbetrug_FOGD.pdf?hsLang=en
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