Cargo Theft Ticked Up 5% Last Quarter — and Two Trackers Can't Agree Whether That's Good or Bad News

Cargo-security firm Overhaul's public Q2 2026 U.S. and Canada cargo theft report puts reported incidents at 605 for the quarter — up 5% from Q1 2026 but down 5% from Q2 2025 — with Southern California's "Red Zone" again flagged as the country's concentrated hot spot. The figures are confirmed directly on Overhaul's own report landing page, which the company makes public without a login; the detailed state-by-state and commodity-type breakdown sits behind a registration-gated download that this filing did not access, so those secondary figures aren't reported here.

A second widely cited tracker tells a different-shaped story for the same quarter. Verisk's CargoNet, as reported by Insurance Journal, recorded 677 cargo theft incidents in Q2 2026 — down 26% from Q2 2025 — but with total reported losses of $304.6 million, more than double the $135.7 million CargoNet attributed to Q2 2025. CargoNet's own read, via Vice President of Operations Keith Lewis, is that theft rings are getting more selective rather than more numerous: "The groups driving the largest losses are not necessarily trying to steal more freight; they are trying to identify the right shipment."

Same quarter, two shapes — because they're counting different things

Overhaul and CargoNet are not reconcilable into one number because they aren't measuring the same universe. Overhaul's public figure is a count of reported incidents; CargoNet's headline pairs a separate incident count with total dollar losses, and per CargoNet's own breakdown, business email compromise and other fraud-based schemes rather than physical trailer theft are increasingly where the loss dollars concentrate — a mode of theft that doesn't necessarily register the same way in a count of physical "incidents" at all. A quarter where more small opportunistic thefts occur (pushing Overhaul's incident count up) can coexist with a quarter where fewer, larger, more targeted frauds occur (pushing CargoNet's dollar figure up while its incident count falls) — both trends can be true in the same three months without contradicting each other.

What both trackers agree on: the loss profile is shifting toward precision over volume. CargoNet's data shows fictitious-pickup schemes and theft events both declining year over year even as dollar losses more than doubled, meaning the successful thefts that are still happening are landing on higher-value freight. Overhaul's own framing points to the same underlying pattern by continuing to flag Southern California as a persistent concentration point rather than a diffusing risk — theft in this data isn't spreading, it's clustering.

What this means for the risk and claims desk

A forwarder or broker managing cargo risk should take three things from having two trackers disagree on shape rather than one clean number:

Don't pick a tracker and stop there. An incident-count-only view (Overhaul's public figure) will miss a quarter where losses are concentrating in fewer, larger events — exactly the pattern CargoNet's data shows. A risk desk relying on incident counts alone to gauge exposure is measuring frequency while missing severity, which is where the dollar risk actually sits this quarter.

Business email compromise and fictitious pickup are the modes to underwrite against, not just physical trailer theft. If the highest-value losses are increasingly coming from identity and paperwork fraud that lets a thief walk a legitimate-looking pickup out the gate, controls built around yard security and GPS tracking address a shrinking share of the actual dollar risk.

Southern California concentration is now a two-source consensus, not a one-report claim. Both trackers point at the same region as a standing hot spot rather than a one-quarter anomaly — worth treating as a durable underwriting and routing input rather than a headline that will age out by next quarter.