Thieves used a fake commercial driver’s license, spoofed emails and forged papers to steal a truckload of lobster meat worth $400,000 from a Massachusetts warehouse just a few days before Christmas.

The Dec. 12 heist from Lineage Logistics, a cold-storage facility in Taunton, is the latest in a string of high-value cargo thefts plaguing the transport industry, according to Dylan Rexing, head of the Indiana company that was hired to transport the now-missing lobster.

“This theft wasn’t random,” Rexing 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.”

As a freight broker, Rexing Companies thought it was hiring a legitimate truck driver from a reputable third-party carrier with a high safety rating to haul the lobster shipment to Costco warehouses in Illinois and Minnesota, Rexing said.

For a midsized brokerage, a $400,000 loss is significant, he said. The shipment was insured, Rexing said, but now the company must buy expensive anti-theft technology. That ultimately drives up costs across the supply chain that consumers end up paying.

Rexing is working with the FBI and Transportation Intermediaries Association, a trade group pushing for industrywide protection against cargo theft. According to TIA’s president, Chris Burroughs, organized cargo theft rings like to target food and beverage, including seafood.

“It’s a top target due to its high value, top demand and ability to quickly resell it,” Burroughs said.

In 2022, Homeland Security launched Operation Boiling Point to combat organized retail crime, which costs state and federal governments $30 billion to $50 billion a year in lost tax revenue and will force the average American family to pay more than $500 in additional costs.

Cargo theft accounts for $15 billion to $35 billion of that retail loss annually, according to Homeland Security.

The Taunton thieves employed a classic logistics scam known as a fictitious pickup — including spoofed emails, forged paperwork and a fake commercial driver’s license — to impersonate the trucking company, win the bid from Rexing and make the pickup from Taunton, Rexing said.

Rexing got suspicious only after the driver of the truck manually disabled its GPS system during the getaway. No one has heard from the fake driver since. Rexing called Taunton police, who told him the same warehouse had suffered the theft of a high-value shipment of crab meat just 10 days earlier.

Rexing said he didn’t know where the stolen lobster had been landed, except somewhere on “the East Coast,” he said.

In recent years, Maine has accounted for about 90% of the nation’s lobster catch, according to market reports. But Maine dealers often buy lobster from Canada to fill orders, especially over the winter, when Canada’s seasonal lobster fleet is fishing and many Mainers are not.

Tracking down where the lobster came from could prove almost as difficult as determining its current location, according to three Maine lobster dealers interviewed on Tuesday who didn’t want to be identified for fear of having their own shipments targeted.

According to a 2018 Colby College study of the lobster supply chain, lobsters landed in Maine will often be bought and sold many times and pass through many hands before winding up on someone’s plate as a lobster roll, lobster tail or lobster mac and cheese.

In 2024, Maine landed 86 million pounds of lobster valued at $528.4 million, but economists behind the Colby study estimate the supply chain adds another $1 billion a year to the annual revenue that the Maine lobster industry generates.

On social media, Maine lobstermen wondered if any of their own catch ended up among the stolen lobster meat.

Maine lobstermen rarely know where what they catch will end up — as a lobster tail sold at a Costco in Indiana or on a plate at a high-end hotel in Hong Kong or Paris. Each leg of that journey drives up the price, but fishermen are paid the same regardless of the destination.

As a result, the boat price of lobster — what a fisherman is paid by a dealer for their catch — is a fraction of what consumers pay for it. Many lobstermen resent that markup, though dealers say most of that is spent transporting live lobster to market.