Cargo Thieves Now Book the Load Themselves. The Policy Wording Decides Who Eats It.

Usually, but not always — and the exceptions have moved. The freight theft that costs Texas carriers the most money now is not a trailer cut open behind a truck stop. It is a load handed to a thief who booked it with a carrier’s stolen identity, delivered voluntarily, off a legitimate load board, on a legitimate rate confirmation.

Munich Re’s 2026 cargo theft work with BSI puts strategic theft — fraudulent pickup, spoofed carrier identity, compromised phone systems and compliance platforms — at roughly 30% of U.S. incidents. That is exactly the category where motor truck cargo policies fight back, because a driver who hands over freight to the wrong party did not suffer a theft in the traditional sense. He gave it away.

Verisk CargoNet’s analysis released September 4, 2026 puts the trend line under it: 273 theft incidents across the five Labor Day windows from 2021 through 2025, rising from 33 in 2021 to 56 in 2025, a 70% increase, with California, Texas, and Illinois the top three states.

What does motor truck cargo insurance cover?

A motor truck cargo policy covers loss of or damage to freight in the insured carrier’s care, custody, or control, subject to the policy’s perils, limits, and exclusions. Theft is normally a covered peril.

Sitting underneath the policy is the carrier’s legal liability. Under the Carmack Amendment, 49 U.S.C. §14706, a motor carrier subject to federal jurisdiction is liable to the person entitled to recover under the bill of lading for the actual loss or injury to the property. That is the obligation the cargo policy is there to fund. Note the structure: the carrier’s liability arises from the bill of lading, and §14706 also allows a carrier, under conditions, to establish rates under which its liability is limited to a value stated by the shipper — the released-value doctrine. A released rate can cap the recovery well below what the freight was worth.

Two more distinctions worth being precise about:

A carrier’s cargo policy is not the shipper’s cargo policy. The carrier’s policy responds to the carrier’s liability. A shipper’s own all-risk cargo or inland transit policy responds to the shipper’s property regardless of who was at fault. When both exist, the shipper’s insurer typically pays and then pursues the carrier.

A broker is not a carrier. A property broker arranging transportation has no Carmack liability for the freight itself. Broker exposure runs through contingent cargo coverage and, more expensively, negligent-hiring claims — a line of exposure that has repriced sharply since the Supreme Court’s decision in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II in May 2026 narrowed the preemption defense brokers had relied on. Brokers are now reporting double- and triple-digit liability premium increases, and some insurers have left the segment.

Which exclusions decide a stolen-freight claim?

Four pieces of policy language do most of the work. Find them in your policy before you need them.

Fictitious pickup and voluntary parting. This is the crucial one for strategic theft. Many cargo forms exclude loss resulting from the insured voluntarily parting with the freight, including delivery to a party posing as the rightful consignee or a legitimate carrier. Some markets cover it back — The Hartford’s carrier logistics form, for example, advertises fictitious pickup and voluntary parting as covered with no exclusion. Whether your form covers it, sublimits it, or excludes it outright is a coverage question with a binary answer, and it is the single most important line item on a modern cargo policy.

Care, custody, or control. Coverage attaches while the freight is in the insured’s care, custody, or control. Interpretation gets contested at the edges — freight staged at a third-party yard, a trailer dropped at a customer’s dock, a load in the hands of a co-brokered carrier. If your operation regularly involves drop trailers or interlining, that has to be reflected in the policy rather than assumed.

Unattended vehicle and locked-trailer warranties. Many forms condition or reduce theft coverage when a loaded vehicle is left unattended, unless it is in a secured, fenced, or attended lot, or unless specific devices are engaged. Some impose a higher theft deductible instead of an exclusion. Read whether the requirement is an exclusion, a warranty, or a deductible trigger — the three produce very different outcomes.

Targeted commodity and scheduled-location limits. Electronics, pharmaceuticals, liquor, copper, and food and beverage often carry lower sublimits or separate warranties. Storage away from a scheduled terminal is frequently limited too, which catches carriers who hold freight over a weekend.

How do thieves book a load as someone else?

Understanding the method is what makes the controls obvious.

The operator finds a real motor carrier with a clean safety record, then creates a version of it: a lookalike email domain, a phone number rerouted to a burner, an updated address on a compliance profile, sometimes access to a hijacked load-board account. The freight gets booked at market rate. Paperwork looks correct because it largely is correct — the MC number is real. A driver arrives, is handed the freight, and the load moves to a cross-dock where it is broken down and resold within a day.

The counter-controls are procedural, not technological:

• Call back on a number you sourced independently, from FMCSA records or your own vetted file, never from the rate confirmation or email signature.
• Treat any recent change to a carrier’s contact information as a red flag and re-verify from scratch. Newly updated phone or email on an otherwise established authority is the most reliable single indicator.
• Verify the driver and truck at pickup against what the carrier told you — name, tractor number, trailer number — and photograph the tractor, trailer, and driver’s license at the dock.
• Require written consent for re-brokering and enforce it. Unauthorized double-brokering is how most of these loads actually move.
• Keep the vetting file. Insurance certificate, authority, safety scores, the callback record, who approved the load and when. This file is both your theft control and your defense in a negligent-hiring claim.
• Use tracking, and know what it earns you. Some markets waive or reduce the theft deductible for freight protected by an operating location-tracking device.

Weekends and holidays remain the concentration point, which is why the Labor Day data matters. A load that delivers Tuesday and gets picked up Friday afternoon sits somewhere for three days with nobody expecting a call.

What to check on your own policy this week

Pull the cargo policy and find four things: the fictitious pickup or voluntary parting language, the theft deductible and whether an unattended-vehicle condition changes it, the storage limit away from scheduled locations, and any targeted-commodity sublimit that applies to what you actually haul. If you cannot locate all four in fifteen minutes, that is itself the finding.

Then compare the cargo limit to your highest-value load, not your average one. Carriers routinely run $100,000 cargo limits while occasionally hauling $180,000 of freight because the limit was set when the operation looked different.

Send us the policy and a list of the commodities you haul and we will mark up the four provisions above against your operation — and price the fictitious-pickup coverage back where it is missing. Start at trucking and transportation insurance or the free truck insurance checkup. Related reading: How Much Does Commercial Truck Insurance Cost in Texas?

The thieves did the work of learning your paperwork. The defense is knowing your policy language at the same level of detail.