What a Lobster Heist Tells Us About Government Failure
On December 12, criminals made off with a $400,000 shipment of lobster meat from a freight hub outside of Boston. It was the latest and most costly in a spate of striking seafood robberies afflicting New England—involving creating a fake trucking load, malware, a deceptively painted truck, and a great deal of intel and advance planning. More Ocean’s Eleven than Goodfellas, despite lobster seeming an almost comical choice for grand larceny.
But while this sensational and slightly perplexing crime has understandably made headlines, and would make a highly bingeable Netflix series, it also exposes a fundamental flaw in how our food system works. Providing American consumers with the bounty of food that lands on our plates on a daily basis is complicated, and freight trucking is an often overlooked ingredient: one that depends on a chaotic, poorly regulated market and the exploitation of its workforce of 3.5 million truck drivers.
Freight industry organizations point to sensational crimes as evidence that law enforcement needs to crack down on cargo theft, and now they’ve supposedly enrolled the increasingly aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the cause. But the growing vulnerability of American freight shipping to sophisticated and costly heists is less about poor law enforcement and more about waning state regulatory capacity. This under-regulation is what makes our food abundance possible in the first place.
Fresh lobster meat can cost between $40 and $90 per pound—slightly less if it’s still live or hasn’t been shelled—making a shipment of lobster worth vastly more than a comparable shipment of sirloin steak. But unlike the steak, at room temperature, within as little as two hours, lobster meat becomes a toxic bacteria bomb no amount of melted butter will repair. This short shelf life is a boon to thieves. Lobsters, unlike TVs and laptops, don’t have serial numbers (and unlike cows or pigs, they don’t have ear tags); once they’re off the truck and into the pot, they can’t easily be tracked, the evidence of any crime gobbled up or trashed within a few days. Consumers would have no way of knowing if they were eating contraband, and it wouldn’t be hard for savvy crooks to find restaurants, restaurant suppliers, and markets to absorb a truck of hot lobster amid the holiday festivities.
Many articles written in the wake of the lobster heist have emphasized that hijackings of food are a growing problem for the freight industry, as well as for insurers, groceries, restaurants, and ultimately consumers. “Affordability” is an odd word to use here—we’re talking lobster affordability, after all—but hijackings, like other forms of cargo theft, do incur higher overall costs for companies involved, much of which is ultimately passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. And cargo theft can afflict staple products as much as big-ticket ones. In the midst of surging egg prices this spring, for instance, thieves in Maryland stole a shipment of 280,000 eggs from the nation’s largest egg producer, Cal-Maine.
Freight industry representatives point to potential links to organized crime. The Department of Homeland Security’s ICE launched “Operation Boiling Point” (no, we’re not making that up) in June to combat this epidemic, although it’s not clear that ICE has much firsthand intel about what’s going on. They cite somewhat dubious statistics circulated by freight industry organizations. In calling for more vigilant prosecution of cargo theft and increased law enforcement attention, the American Trucking Association puts the value of stolen cargo in the United States at $35 billion per annum and claims that the number of documented instances increased, year over year by 36 percent between the first quarter of 2024 and the first quarter of 2025.
But these numbers are about as reliable as a lobster stew at a Wyoming all-night diner. After some data scrubbing by criminologist Robert Burns and sociologist Charles Crawford, a search of the FBI’s Unified Crime Report produces about 15,000 total incidents that meet the legal definition of cargo theft, including 3,545 in 2021. Private logistics tracking firms have their own counts that are in the same ballpark. Either way, it’s a tiny percentage of the billions of tons of cargo shipped by truck annually in the U.S. by the over 580,000 registered carriers in three million semi-tractors.
The mismatch between calls for a heavy-handed crackdown and the dearth of good data on the crimes should indicate something is amiss. In fact, no one has a clear idea of what’s going on—not the government, not carriers, not logistics firms. That’s why Burns and Crawford worry that the increased involvement of law enforcement officers, a blunt tool at the best of times, will produce “crime control theater” without eliminating the underlying vulnerabilities that allow sophisticated criminals to jack the seafood platter.
In reality, theft is commonplace in the American food system because of its size, complexity, and under-regulation. The American food system is vast, with well over a million points of sale spread across restuarants, grocers, and convienence stores. To get food from producers to sellers, shipping companies, brokers, and logistics supply firms orchestrate a ballet of freight across a sprawling network of ports, roadways, and warehouses. Much of this is increasingly digitized but poorly overseen.
Police are still investigating what happened with the Massachusetts lobster heist, but it probably went something like this: The bandits used a mixture of low- and high-tech tricks to gain control of a legitimate carrier’s account on a “load board,” the online marketplace where brokers and carriers haggle over proposed freight contracts. Under the guise of that carrier, the thieves lay in wait for an especially succulent load to come across the board, at which point, they bid and leapt into action.
The bandits showed up, as scheduled, at 2 p.m. on December 12. Their truck was painted with the name of the impersonated carrier, and they maintained contact with the other parties using a spoof email address indistinguishable from the real carrier’s address but for a stray hyphen. Their broker, a company in Evansville, Indiana, got wise around 4 p.m., when they noticed the lobster haul’s GPS tracker had been deactivated. By then those lobsters were long gone.
If this all sounds elaborate and surprisingly high-tech for a seafood scam, that’s because America’s freight infrastructure, for lobsters and electronics alike, less resembles an orderly city grid than tangled jungle vines. It’s decentralized, fragmented, and sprawling. Most trucking companies are tiny businesses—90 percent of carriers run fewer than 10 cabs, and a full 10 percent of cabs are owner-operated—and fierce competition in the industry leaves them with tight margins. Smaller carriers often struggle to modernize their equipment, creating technical headaches when they interact with logistics support companies, retailers, and brokers. All parties may be cutting corners and re-brokering loads to make ends meet. “Double-brokering,” where a contracted broker subcontracts a load to a third party without the knowledge or consent of the customer, is technically illegal but all too common. All of this fragmentation makes fraud, such as scammers getting their hands behind the steering wheel of a truck of lobsters, much easier to perpetrate.
The fractured and decentralized nature of American truck shipping is, by design, the product of bad laws, weak regulations, and hollowed-out regulatory agencies. The 1935 Motor Carrier Act, a piece of New Deal legislation, initially imposed strict federal standards on the trucking industry regarding fleet maintenance, labor relations, workplace safety, routes, and fare pricing set by the Interstate Commerce Commission, or ICC. But the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 gutted the ICC’s regulatory powers and eliminated carrier, fare, and route regulations. The ICC itself was shuttered in 1995. In 1999, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Act reimposed some baseline regulations and created the Department of Transportation’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, or FMCSA, mostly to improve roadway safety.
Last year, Nebraska’s Republican Senator Deb Fischer and Washington D.C.’s Democratic Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton co-sponsored the Household Goods Shipping Consumer Protection Act to give the FMSCA some additional bite. If passed, it would have required freight carriers to provide the FMSCA with a valid business address to register; they currently don’t even have to. The bill did not get a vote, and, today, it remains farcically easy to register to receive a USDOT number. With that number, fraudsters could present themselves as a normal business and register bids for million-dollar contracts.
The federal government deregulated this industry on the premise that fewer regulations means more carriers and a more competitive freight marketplace, giving everyone the lower shipping costs they crave. That’s mostly worked as intended, especially for food, resulting in reduced shipping costs and quicker delivery.
But this combination of reduced oversight and many more, smaller trucking companies also creates crime opportunities. As trucking logistics has become more technologically sophisticated in the past two decades, it has also created a host of security vulnerabilities. The technological asymmetry between small carriers and larger logistics support companies may also be a problem, with criminals targeting carriers who can’t install the right security update on older systems or who still rely on phone calls to confirm order details.
So whom do affected parties have to turn to? The tiny FMCSA—its 1,000 employees monitor 3.5 million truck drivers in the U.S.—is primarily focused on driver safety, not security, and so refers complaints to the Department of Justice.
Meanwhile, cheap freight also creates more motive for theft in the form of immiserated workers. Freight truck drivers are miserably overworked, horribly underpaid, and have astonishingly high turnover rates. Once a prime example of a stable union job, today fewer than 20 percent of truck drivers are unionized. To meet contracts, they are sometimes expected to drive for unsafe (and illegal) durations of time, putting in 60- to 70-hour workweeks, and they may still wind up getting docked pay for loads delayed by weather or traffic. Happy, well-paid employees might reduce theft, and industries with lower rates of turnover are harder to infiltrate for malicious schemers looking to scoop intel on vulnerable crustaceans.
Increasing regulation of American shipping might marginally increase consumer prices, something few politicians are likely to sign off on at the moment. But the current plan of dedicating more police resources to cargo theft is unlikely to do much. There are, of course, less flashy approaches to preventing cargo theft that politicians and policymakers should consider. Improving the UCR and crime data tracking in general would be worthwhile, as would working with state policymakers to create a systematic nationwide framework for defining and prosecuting double brokering and strategic cargo fraud. Merely ensuring that the Transportation Department’s FMCSA is adequately staffed, resourced, and empowered would be a good start, as would the modest objectives of Fischer and Norton’s stalled Household Goods Shipping Consumer Protection Act.
There’s an important larger message about our food system, here: Slashing regulations, firing federal workers, and wrecking the basic capacities of government officials to do their jobs guarantees the bad government it purports to fix and creates the conditions for the fraud and corruption that tough-talking politicians pretend to abhor. The abundance of our food system is the product of savvy business and novel technology, but also of regulation: of food safety, worker protections, antitrust laws, and a slew of other laws designed to make sure safe food reliably lands on our plates on time and at a fair price. Food system fixes require more of the latter. The solution to lobster heists looks more like guys with clipboards and visors than guys with guns and badges.
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