Thieves have stolen more than $100 million in data center equipment from trucks on American highways since June, using hacked freight accounts and spoofed GPS signals, Ars Technica reported on Monday, citing an NBC News investigation.
NBC spoke with several industry leaders, consultants and investigators advising the law enforcement offices probing the largest thefts. The loads they are tracking are the raw material of the AI build-out: servers, fiber-optic cables, computer memory chips, copper wires and bitcoin mining machines.
The crews work like this. They hack freight brokers’ accounts on shipment-listing websites and post fake shipments to draw real bids, then send a malicious link to any trucking company that responds. A single click installs software that hands control of the victim’s account to the thieves, who then start bidding on real shipments themselves.
Getting the freight to the resellers takes one more layer of cover. Sometimes the crew hires a genuine driver for the pickup, someone with no idea the job is a scam. Other times accomplices get hired with fake driver’s licenses. Either way, the cargo ends up with a driver working for the thieves. In one of the largest thefts, the crew spoofed the load’s tracking coordinates so that digital monitoring showed nothing amiss.
Police have recovered some loads. Two stolen freights found in Illinois held about $300,000 worth of copper wire spools and roughly $1 million in custom-made data center modular power solutions equipment, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office estimated. A Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department case turned up data center cooling equipment bound for the company Deepcool AI in a trailer mixed with nicotine pouches, televisions, shoes, printers, speakers and skin care cosmetics. Experts told NBC the mixed freight is the worry: the losses reach past the AI industry to goods ordinary Americans buy.
The biggest jobs have ended worse. In two of the largest thefts NBC found, none of the equipment was recovered, and off-duty police officers hired to escort the shipments were targeted in hit-and-runs.
The tactics are new; the crime is not. Cargo theft of every kind already runs into the tens of billions of dollars a year, and railroad police have taken to chasing train robbers with drones. Trucks carrying seven figures of hardware only raise the stakes.