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A $400,000 shipment of lobsters headed for Costco locations in Illinois and Minnesota was hijacked before arriving at its delivery points.A shipment of lobster meat valued at $400,000 vanished en route from a warehouse in Taunton to Costco locations in the Midwest, according to the the Indiana-based freight company hired to transport the costly crustaceans.
“Unfortunately this is true,” Dylan Rexing, president and CEO of Rexing Companies, said in an email confirming the alleged heist Sunday evening. “We do believe it is organized crime.”
The FBI is actively investigating the incident which looks to be part of a growing pattern of organized cargo thefts targeting high-value freight in the United States, Rexing said.
The load of processed lobster meat took off from Lineage Logistics, a cold storage facility in Taunton, on Dec. 12. The shipment was bound for Costco warehouses in Illinois and Minnesota but never made it there.
This was the second theft from the same warehouse this month, Rexing said. On Dec. 2, “they had a load of crab stolen from the same warehouse,” his email said.
Lineage Logistics did not respond to a request for comment Sunday evening.
“This theft wasn’t random,” Rexing’s email said. “It followed a pattern we’re seeing more and more, where criminals impersonate legitimate carriers using spoofed emails and burner phones to hijack high-value freight while it’s in transit.”
Rexing said his company hired a driver “that was fraudulently impersonating another carrier” in a case of “highly sophisticated” identity theft.
The FBI in Boston, per agency policy, declined to confirm whether it was involved in the investigation.
Taunton police did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday evening.
The last known location of the lobster “was the warehouse it was loaded at,” Rexing said.
Rexing said he doesn’t know where it ended up, but speculates that it “likely went to Boston, or NYC to a seafood market and sold for .50/cents on the dollar.”
Rexing said his company is working closely with the FBI and Transportation Intermediaries Association, which has been instrumental in coordinating information-sharing and pushing for stronger safeguards to combat cargo theft nationwide.
The consequences of thefts like this impact local companies, their points of contacts, and ultimately consumers, Rexing said.
“For a mid-sized brokerage like ours, a $400,000 loss is significant,” he said. “It forces tough decisions and ultimately drives up costs across the supply chain — costs consumers ultimately end up paying."
An uptick in cargo theft prompted Homeland Security Investigations earlier this year to launch an initiative dubbed Operation Boiling Point aimed at dismantling organized rings.
Organized retail crime costs federal and state governments nearly $15 billion in lost tax revenue, not including lost sales taxes. And it is estimated that the average American family will pay more than $500 annually in additional costs due to the impacts, the agency said.
Such thefts have also come across the radar of the US Department of Transportation.
In September, the agency issued a request from authorities, transportation agencies, and freight carriers.
“Cargo theft is a growing concern for the U.S. transportation system, costing the economy billions annually,” the DOT said. “These crimes involve opportunistic ‘straight thefts’ of trailers, containers, and loads at truck stops or multimodal distribution hubs and highly coordinated operations conducted by organized criminal networks.”
The thefts “create significant economic losses, disrupt supply chains, and in some cases fund broader illicit activities such as narcotics trafficking, counterfeiting, and human smuggling,” the DOT said.
Rexing said brokers, like him, “are on the front lines of this problem.”
Until federal agencies are equipped with “modern enforcement tools to keep pace with organized criminal networks,” the thefts will continue “to disrupt businesses and impact everyday prices,” Rexing said.
Tonya Alanez can be reached at tonya.alanez@globe.com. Follow her @talanez.
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