Cargo theft costs the trucking industry $18 million a day according to the American Trucking Association, with vehicle transport companies increasingly victimized by hackers looking to exploit the rising value of cars and trucks.

Indeed, it’s more than simple car theft. Auto shipping companies are losing loads of money to thieves and fraudsters using sophisticated methods.

“This isn’t the like out of the movie type of scene where like guys jump out of the woods and take cars. These are guys that are sitting behind computer screens and they are using a network, often unknowingly, to members and participants of the network that are moving cars to certain locations, and then before you know it, the car is out of the country and it’s not coming back,” Matt Bradley, CEO of auto transport platform, Super Dispatch , says in an interview.

In a report on auto transport trends, Super Dispatch found the volume and value of such thefts has increased. Specifically:

  • The number of vehicles stolen per incident this year has grown from one at the start of 2026 to three in the past three months.
  • The median value of a stolen vehicle is approximately $80,000.
  • Three out of every four stolen vehicles are model year 2024 or newer, indicating “criminals are intentionally pursuing newer, higher-value vehicles moving through the transportation network.”

Thieves aren’t being as obtuse as simply hijacking a transport trailer or driving vehicles off storage lots.

A bad actor can capture relevant information such as login credentials to a shipping company’s computer network by sending phishing emails to employees disguised as legitimate communications, Bradley explains.

“You will see a good tow truck show up to the yard with all the relevant information,” Bradley says. “That tow truck does not know that they're participating in an illicit act. They grab the vehicle. They take the vehicle on that tow truck. The tow truck driver drives it from the yard or the auction facility, to an undisclosed location, which is known to all parties. Then what happens is good guy drops it off in parking lot. Bad guy shows up. Bad guy takes it. Gone forever.”

It’s a situation Michael Bejda, founder of Above Auto Transport understands well. Speaking during a Super Dispatch organized webinar on the subject, Bejeda related his experience and his defense against being victimized.

“There are countless phishing emails that come out,” Bejda said. “I know my accounting team gets fraudulent emails all day, every day, saying that a carrier is requesting payment to this email now. Those things happen on a daily basis, and protecting yourself is pretty much the only thing you can do — making sure that you have the right systems in place, and then making sure you have the right insurances.”

It helps to recognize so-called red flags that may offer strong hints of an attempt to compromise a shipper’s network.

“The big red flags are always the addresses, phone numbers, stuff like that,” Luke Kreider, president of Ship Me My Car, said during the webinar. “But you can look at it and see why — what did they change it to? When it changed names completely and everything changed, and you look up the phone numbers and all of a sudden now it's a Google number — those are the red flags.”

While actual vehicle thefts using the latest technology is one form of fraud victimizing auto transporters, a purely financial, low-tech scheme, continues to cost shippers.

Called double brokering, the illegal practice involves several steps:

  • A shipper or broker awards the load to a carrier
  • That carrier secretly passes the load on to a third-party carrier
  • That third-party carrier has no deal with the shipper or broker
  • The assigned carrier accepts payment for the load even though it didn’t actually transport it and may actually refuse to pay the third-party carrier which did move the vehicles.

Bradley points out double brokering voids the insurance on the load, so if there’s an accident and the vehicles are destroyed, the damage isn’t covered. But someone has to pay.

“Carriers are not, I would say, the most financially resilient companies and they may not have the money to fund that error,” he says. “Who's left holding the bag, either the shipper or the broker, depending upon the situation. That can be nine spots on a truck and $100,000. That can be a $900,000 bill.”

Super Dispatch offers its customers a variety of software tools to combat fraud and theft by helping them make informed decisions based in part on bolstering carrier identification and verifying drivers have valid licenses.

Another tool is called Gate Pass Protection, which is designed to ensure only the authorized transport driver has access to a particular vehicle in an auction or storage lot.

As Bradley explains it, documents with sensitive information, including the exact location of a vehicle attached to the file sent to a driver, are locked. Only the authorized driver would be issued the Gate Pass, which unlocks the documents when he or she is within a mile of the pickup location.

“It’s one small thing that prevents these types of documents from changing hands rapidly in a way that’s unintended from the shippers’ perspective,” says Bradley.

In the two years since he became Super Dispatch CEO, Bradley says he’s seen fraud and vehicle theft increase, and he imagines the crimes were already on the upswing before then.

Why are vehicles such an attractive target? Bradley says it’s not hard to figure out.

“A vehicle is a high-value good," he says. "I think vehicles are getting more expensive by the day.”