Somewhere between Massachusetts and the Midwest, $400,000 worth of lobsters vanished.
The boosted shipments, destined for Costco stores in Illinois and Minnesota, were picked up by trucks in Taunton, Massachusetts… and never made it to their destination.
As reported by Fox 32 Chicago, with additional reporting by Fox 11 Los Angeles, the logistics company responsible for the haul says this was part of a larger, organized cargo theft operation that they really wish someone would do something about.
Daring heists are an oddly specific beat I’ve been covering for a while. When times get tough, when the economy is in shambles, when governments only cater to the wealthy and forget about everyone else, everyone else starts stealing stuff in large quantities. High-end cheeses, 100,000 eggs, crown jewels from the Louvre, $365,000 Banksy paintings, 15 dudes that steal everything from a jewelry store in seconds, 35,000 pints of Guinness, a $6 million gold toilet, $7,000 worth of Labubus.
Hell, even monkeys are stealing phones, and sea otters are stealing surfboards. It’s so rough out there that even animals are getting in on it.
Dylan Rexing, CEO of Indiana-based Rexing Companies, said the stolen lobsters are a textbook example of a national problem. High-value goods move across long supply chains with little to no protection. Organized theft rings know exactly where the weak points are. But they’re not hard for anyone to figure out. It’s all the usual suspects. Ports, truck stops, freight hubs, and long, desolate stretches of highway where a trailer can disappear without notice.
Just the other day, I wrote about how a truck driver pulling into an Indiana truck stop stepped away from his truck for a second and came back to find it loaded with $16 million worth of cocaine. Shipping trucks are becoming more commonly targeted by criminals.
The FBI is now investigating the missing seafood.
Black market lobsters sound silly, but it’s no sillier than black-market Labubus and cheeses and Guinness. That said, the numbers behind cargo thefts like this are a lot sillier. Homeland security investigations estimate that stolen cargo costs the US economy somewhere between $15 billion and $5 billion every year.
Earlier this year, the agency launched Operation Boiling Point to combat organized theft networks that target shipments in transit. The Department of Transportation issued a request for information asking law enforcement, transportation companies, and the public how to better protect the U.S. supply chain. In its summary, the DOT described a mix of opportunistic thefts and highly coordinated criminal operations, some of which are linked to broader illegal activities like drug trafficking and human smuggling.
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