Today, a bit of a hypothetical that is really not hypothetical at all, though we’ll withhold names with multiple court cases pending. But consider the scenario: You engage with a broker you feel you know is legitimate for a load of copper moving toward the Northeast. You drop that load for $1,600, you ultimately get paid, and you go on about your business to the next piece of freight.

Meanwhile, though, the same load of copper is being rebooked by the same “broker” – note the scare quotes, certainly safe use them in this scenario. The “broker” contracts with yet another owner to move the copper west to the center of the country, whereupon that owner drops the cargo and goes along his own merry way.

Yet again, the “broker” now has another owner-operator in his sites for the third move of the copper, this time with a destination in the Los Angeles area. The operator who picks this load up, though (promised a handsome rate for his work), along the way gets a good indication of just where the "broker" wants to send him. It's no kind of manufacturer who needs the coiled, finished copper for their products, rather the address for what looks to be the kind of place where old cars and trucks and scrap metal of various kinds are sent to die, to be reprocessed -- a salvage yard, in essence.

This operator obeys his spidey senses and calls the cops, opening a case that then winds its way back to the origin of the copper in the rural Southeast, where a rural detective IDs and then orders you, the owner-operator who picked up the load to begin with, arrested. You land in jail in your home region, spending several nights locked up before being bonded out for $50K.

The original crooks -- the “broker” on the load, likely impersonating a legitimate entity or otherwise part of a double-brokering ring of authorized entities -- meanwhile get to sit at their computers wherever they might be and keep up the "good" work. You and your leasing carrier face scheduled court dates that come and go, ongoing discussion amongst defense and prosecution, with no resolution to your charge.

When we first learned of a particular case fitting these parameters back late last summer, the arrest had just happened, with a September court date scheduled, which was then pushed to October. None of those court dates held for the owner, and still, there’s been no resolution as efforts to untangle the scheme continue. The charge? "Obtaining property by false pretenses in excess of $100,000," apparently for falling for a fake broker’s representation of himself as legitimate as he schemes with an unknown number of actually knowing accomplices to steal the copper.

How's that for personal risk?

Today on the podcast, a conversation with cargo-theft security firm Overhaul’s Danny Ramon about just what that company’s seeing in the so-called “strategic theft” landscape around the nation. That’s the kind of theft described in the scenario above, often with multiple layers of deception and misrepresentation involved to use entirely legitimate, unwitting operations to steal hot commodities.

As mentioned in the podcast:

**Alex Lockie's recent story about the FraudWatch system from Overhaul: https://overdriveonline.com/15737195

**Transportation attorney Hank Seaton's "Supply chain protocol": https://overdriveonline.com/15302784