Despite the continuous and significant rise in cargo theft in North America there is a way to secure your trailers and expensive cargo that can beat the odds.

Here is how a trucking company in Georgia spent a few hundred dollars and recovered almost a quarter of a million dollar cargo theft, in addition to saving their reputation, and customer trust.

A little background will help understand the significance of this theft recovery story. For many decades Georgia is facing serious consequences of cargo thefts and has been fighting a hard battle to curb it. 

For them, high frequency of cargo theft leads not only to inflation (as companies add costs to cover theft losses) and risk to public health (in terms of expired food and pharmaceuticals for example) but also lost state tax revenue (as trucks bypass the state altogether) and the overall degraded state reputation.

Back in 2008 Georgia started an organized effort involving multiple strategies. Setting up a task force and state wide coordination of theft information were the main tools that brought results. But it also employed other tactics including physical surveillance, and old fashioned detective work. 

Those efforts led to 60 percent reduction in cargo theft reports around 2017. But that proved temporary and nothing lasted for long and today Georgia is still one of the top five riskiest states in US (top in 2022). 

In this insecure environment it wasn’t a surprise to see one of our clients lose a couple of their high value refrigerated cargo containers on a Saturday recently.  But what is eye opening is the fast detection by the following Monday and recovery of the two containers along with arrests of the thieves!

Here is a quick overview of the story. Our client picks up expensive shrimps from the port and delivers them to a food distributor in Atlanta some 265 miles away. The usual routine is to pick up the load from the port on Friday, park it in their yard over the weekend and deliver it by Tuesday. But things went wrong this time and the disaster struck them on Saturday.

But what changed the game were our highly covert GPS trackers installed on each one of the trailers that revealed their location. And once it was shared with the police on Monday it was all over for the thieves. Overall the client saved some $240k (including costs of two chassis, two refrigerated containers, and the load).

We are going to share this story with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) and take their long fight against cargo theft to a whole new level.

This is part of our commitment to use advanced GPS and covert tracking technology to protect valuable cargo, secure companies and improve the lives of our citizens.