Why Cargo Crime Keeps Getting Worse

Freight fraud has moved way past the old stereotype of random cargo theft.

Barry Conlon, CEO of Overhaul, joins Blythe from Manifest to break down what’s actually happening in the market: more sophisticated criminal networks, more pressure on shippers to own the problem, and a growing gap between how fast freight moves and how well it gets verified. He argues that prevention matters more than recovery, because by the time you’re chasing freight down, the damage is already done. 

A few standout points from the conversation:

• Barry says the last 24 to 36 months have brought a level of volume and sophistication he has never seen before. 
• He ties part of the shift back to post-COVID buyer behavior and the ease of moving stolen goods back into gray markets. 
• He says Overhaul protects about $1.4 trillion in cargo value on its platform and focuses on identifying non-compliance before it becomes a loss. 
• He explains how fraud varies by geography, with North American fraud tactics spreading abroad while markets like Mexico and Brazil often involve more overt hijacking risk. 
• He makes the case that cargo risk is now a boardroom issue because lost product often cannot be replaced fast enough, which turns a theft problem into a market share problem.

Links from the show: 

• Overhaul's latest insight on cargo crime
• Connect with Barry on LinkedIn
• Watch this episode on YouTube

-----------------------------------------

THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS!

SPI Logistics has been a Day 1 supporter of this podcast which is why we're proud to promote them in every episode. During that time, we've gotten to know the team and their agents to confidently say they are the best home for freight agents in North America for 40 years and counting. Listen to past episodes to hear why.

CargoRex is the search engine for the logistics industry—connecting LSPs with the right tools, services, events, and creators to explore, discover, and evolve.

Digital Dispatch maximizes and manages your #1 sales tool with a website that establishes trust and builds rock-solid relationships with your leads and customers.

Transcript

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 0:37

Blythe, welcome into another episode of everything. Is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers and afraid. I'm your host. Mike Milligan, we are proudly presented by SPI logistics, and we've got another great interview for y'all today, because we are live at manifest, a future of supply chain and logistics, and we've got Barry con one. He is the CEO of overhauls. Overhaul has been a guest on the show previously, and I stalk y'all YouTube because I think your YouTube is so great to be able to take that peek into cyber crime, not just cyber crime, but freight and freight fraud and how cargo crime is evolving through the years, and it's kind of always existed, right?

Barry Conlon: 1:22

Well, I've been in this industry now for over 30 years, you know? So, yeah, I've been doing this for quite some time. But then the level of sophistication and the just the overall volume of attacks that we're seeing on a day to day basis, nobody's ever seen anything close to this level in the last 24 months, 36 months, it's just been crazy, insanely active. And for good reason, it's just such a profitable enterprise for criminal networks. You know, the return investment is extremely good their risk ratio. Like, if you're a criminal, there's two things you look at, return and risk, right? So if it's like a it's like a swing. If one sees the other and you're seeing your risk is disappearing, because basically, a property crime is not really seen as that important, particularly by law enforcement. And you know, so there's, in most cases, it just cross a jurisdiction that could be a mile away, you're not going to see any law enforcement response. So it's been left up to the shippers to really deal with this problem, but it but the levels are unprecedented at the moment, and I've just never seen anything like it. So that's going to continue, because there's no criminal network in the world that is that in their current state, are making vast amounts of money and not sharing any downside. Are going to move away from that crime anytime soon? If anything, we're seeing lots of different actors getting

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 2:41

involved now. You mentioned over 24 months. What has happened over 24 months for this dramatic uptick in

Barry Conlon: 2:47

we're not really handles with criminal enterprises like covid was the defining factor right now, and that's like what we're actually, I think, the near the anniversary of six years, when it just everything

Unknown: 3:00

happened right in the world. They call it BC and AC. Now that that that was the

Barry Conlon: 3:06

events that really shifted everything from the criminal network, people just started to buy more online. They got used to receiving things even like pharmaceuticals, even maybe even adjustables are given to their children on the doorstep. It looked legit. The packaging looks good. It arrived maybe in a legit vehicle that you recognize the driver, so you're not going to question that anymore. You're just going to accept it and you want more of it. You're not going away from that convenience factor. Kernels have taken massive, you know, advantage of that, what they their biggest challenge previously, was getting the stolen goods back into the supply chain. We call it the shift from black to gray, gray market. And what that really means is that, you know, in most cases, it was difficult to sell a stolen product like you'd see things on warehouse.com or some other sites were still in its factory packing. Law enforcement would call it a clue. It's probably stolen. But now cinema is factory packing. Nobody even bats an eyelid. They don't even look at it anymore. You're just going to order it because it's in short supply and you need it. And criminals really are very focused on that. They know what's in short supply so they know get a greater return on that they could sell it higher. Used to be 510, cents on the dollar. Back when I first started here, I was 25 years ago in the States, and now it's upwards of 80 to 100% and in some cases, when it's a really short product that's in short supply, they'll get above 100% return. So that kind of massive generation of profit is just driving more and more what we're kind of legal entities into actually conducting crime, and we're seeing that now, particularly in supply chain, legitimate carriers, drivers. I'd say, 20 years ago, you never saw driver involvement, only in Mexico. But now here, it's, it's, it's, it's invasive. It's happening so, so often now so and they're taking advantage of the fact that they're there's such a fragmented supply chain as it relates for identity and who you are, people are taking shortcuts because they want to move fast. And you know, there isn't adequate checks at pickup points now to actually prevent these people just literally driving away with millions of dollars. And that's happening every day. We're we're seeing. I can't even go into just how many reported thefts we're dealing with every day. It used to be like, you know, a couple of months now it's like dozens a day. They're only the ones we're being told about. And for every reported theft, seven go on reporting

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 5:32

because the customer doesn't want to let they

Barry Conlon: 5:34

definitely don't want their competitor. Years to know that there's a shortage of product in this area, because I've just lost, like, I received a report there a couple of days ago, and one of our biggest growth vectors in overhaul has been AI infrastructure. It's out of, you know, like, you can't make these things fast enough, like, and, you know, we know the big companies that are building these data centers, so criminals know that, and they're targeting. I heard of one hit mid last week that was $20 million full truckload theft and a $10 million theft two days later against not the same company, but the same industry, and that was a fictitious pick up.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 6:12

So is it servers that they're targeting materials?

Barry Conlon: 6:16

Ai server, right? Wow. They are the hottest item out there at the moment, and it's not just for the traditional, illegitimate purposes of reselling them back in the industry. We have intelligence that there are some state actors involved too. Wow, yeah. So you know, there are restrictions around where these can be sold, what jurisdictions they can go to. Our control centers are watching shipments that are moving in the direction they shouldn't be going in, heading to jurisdictions that are banned under legislation like the chips act. And you know that's helping some of our customers actually notify these third parties that they're dealing with that we're sending inspection teams in, and then you see them coming back to where they should have gone. And that's just a day to day to day activity with us now. We're, you know, AI servers are just the hottest item out there at the moment.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 7:06

Are there any outside of AI data, data servers? Are there any other products that folks are targeting? I mean, I've heard pistachios, energy drinks, you know, and those things are hard to track because they get consumed, versus electronics that, you know,

Barry Conlon: 7:20

electronics are not easy to track either. Oh, you steal an FTL of, say, chips, whatever. There's no individual marking on that. Like, if you have $2 million of stolen, you know, AI infrastructure chips, or whatever like from an Nvidia or something like that. You're not no law enforcement officer who stops you and says, open the trunk. Let me see what you have in there. Oh, look, you've got a lot of these things. And if he knew the value was multi million dollars, he can't prove it's stolen. There's no There's no report of that, you know, missing out there. There's no actual follow up to see what's going on. So you're dealing with that kind of challenge on a day to day basis. But you know, this is just the silent crime that these guys are flowing flying below the radar, and they are just making money, like it's like, there's just no end to it, and they're talking about it, and that's dragging more and more criminal networks in because it's so lucrative. And you know the downside is, even if you're caught and somebody did actually have a product, like maybe a cell phone, you can prove it was taken illegally, they're out later on that day, because it's a property crime.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 8:32

So okay, so a shipper, a customer, they know they obviously don't want their freight stolen, and so they know that they need some kind of a solution. So how, where does overhaul come in? How do they know what to look for? First of all, because they probably contacted the authorities, and the authorities, from what you're saying, are not going to offer any kind of help because it is probably out of their jurisdiction, or maybe they see it as petty crime. So what is it a shipper to do? And then how does overhaul come in and overhaul, for lack of better phrase,

Barry Conlon: 9:03

it's a really good you know, your thought process there around that question is really interesting, because, you know, it is becoming the shippers problem. You cannot rely on law enforcement response there. It's a crime. They don't understand. They don't have the resources to fight it's already going to have their jurisdiction, or at least they would say, contact your insurance company, right? So industry has to respond, and that's why my company's so successful. Are we're called in by shippers, mostly, I'd say about 95% of my customers are the household brands that you would know and operate on global basis, where this complexity is actually worse, overseas, in places like Mexico and Brazil, than is there. And we have to offer them service on a global basis, about $1.4 trillion in cargo values on our platform at any one time. And our job is to actually secure that supply chain. So the integrity of that supply chain as it relates for if you're a large global electronics manufacturer. Now you're relying on all these different entities out there, like freight forwarding networks, broker networks, if it's international, you're dealing with kind of cargo you might be dealing with vessels or air freight providers. So it's a very, very complex world you're managing. Our job is to provide an umbrella of integrity around that movement where freight slows down or is exchanged, these are risk points where, typically, that's where the problem occurs. Our job is to kind of manage the integrity of that operation, or to make sure the right people are involved, particularly if you think about fictitious pickups, making sure that the person actually you're handing the freight to is on a legitimate party. And then having an ability to kind of watch the freight, you know, it's an AI monitoring service that we provide where people are aware of compliance. So you're, you're, if you're a shipper, you expect this Global Freight Forwarder, this air freight provider, to you probably have a signed contract with them, but they're using 50 different vendors underneath that who don't have a signed contract, but you're still relying on compliance happening at that level. Our job, because we know what compliance looks like, it's already coded into our platform. When non compliance occurs at whatever level, we get a push notification that there's a problem, and if that problem is left addressed, it's going to lead to an actual law. So our job is to actually push that knowledge point to the offender, issue them the instruction of how to get back into compliance. And then, once you're in compliance, your chance of actually suffering a loss once everything's been done right, is minuscule. So that's why we're so successful. Our loss ratio, if you look at the insurance lens, around that 1.4 trillion is less than 7% Oh, wow. So So effectively, it's like zero. And so our our mousetrap really works. It really works well because we develop collaboration amongst the different parties. In most cases, non compliance is unwitting. They don't know they're supposed to do it this way. They don't know they're not allowed to stop there. You know, the direction of travel is going that way for a purpose, but it looks like it's going the wrong way for us. So all of that kind of like communication and getting collaboration going into supply chain is what we're really good at. And when all that happens and happens correctly, and it leads to a faster supply chain and a more resilient and secure supply chain. So it

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 12:14

sounds like it's a very heavier lift on the preventative side of things and helping.

Barry Conlon: 12:20

So we get a lot of credit. You see, you talk about our YouTube channel and LinkedIn and all that about people talk about our recoveries. They all look really sexy James Bond stuff, and a lot of it is we consider recoveries failures, because it should never have gone missing in the first place. So for every one recovery or theft that occurs in our network, in our under our protection, it's almost always because people didn't follow our prompts. And there that's a way of judging the collaboration of that vendor, and shippers use that as a way of, kind of measuring the quality of that vendor. And a lot of vendors are let go because of non conformance, or non compliance. But there's for every one event that occurs like that, where they don't listen, that's that's the exception. There are 1000s that don't get hit or touched at all, because we're making sure they swim through the shark infested water safely, right? And that's what we're doing all day. So I always kind of, I get a chuckle out of it, because I get pinged all the time by some competitors going, Oh, I love your recovery stuff. That's like, wow, that's a magnificent marketing and I go, guys failure. And they go, you crazy like that. And I get a good of a kick out of it, because we are very good at recovering, because we know people will not always do what we tell them to do, but when they don't, we have to clean up well, and that's part of our law enforcement network and making sure they're like, enabled to be successful. And that's law enforcement. When we pick up the phone, we call them, or they see they're using our technology, and they see an event happening that is positive, they're really happy because they know it's us and they can trust

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 13:57

the data. Oh, so law enforcement is actually using the software. Yes, that's super interesting.

Barry Conlon: 14:02

Yeah, we're actually moving that to a next level, where we'll be doing a formal alliance with and supporting Interpol, so every law enforcement agency in the world will be inside the platform.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 14:15

And then what happens from a you mentioned that the recovery aspect, I would imagine that the recovery aspect, and maybe even the prevention aspect, is different from country to country. Yes, how do you navigate those complexities?

Barry Conlon: 14:26

I always tell people, yeah, recovery in northern facts, Texas. We're based in Austin, Texas, right? Recovering in North recovery in North Texas is talk about talk about one that's more complex, like, how about a recovery in Kosovo? Language knowledge? You know who is. You know all of these other factors that play in when you're dealing internationally, but our our procedures, our capabilities, have to work as well there as you do in North Texas. And that's one thing we pride ourselves on, is our global capability for immediate response and law enforcement engagement. It's critical, because police all over the world, it's a real knowledge gap. They don't really understand what this crime is, what it means. How are they involved, or how can they actually be successful? Our job is that's part of what we will be doing with Interpol is really a big education campaign to actually teach people about this problem, because a lot of covid really showed a lot of entities like these big, jurisdictional kind of government bodies that supply chain is strategic, where before it was ignored, covid changed up. Now people realize that hang on. It matters. Others. If we can't get our stuff onto the shelves, people get upset. And once the people are upset, that's when people start getting you know, politicians are getting fired, so they're involved now as well. So, you know, covid really changed the whole dynamic in a positive way, also a negative way, negative, because it just opened this world of kind of free activity for criminals, positive in the way that it actually kind of rooted people, people's attention to, you know, a real existential threat that can matter to a family if you can't get baby formula. I know we all joke about toilet roll during covid. Remember that like but that was a problem. It was a real problem, and people were not happy. But then you look at infant formula and stuff like that, or you look at medications that people really need are life saving it can really hurt, and taking it seriously and being preventative in thinking that's one of the reasons why we developed this Law Enforcement Network globally, is that it can actually matter in helping people be successful in recovering something and using that as a learning event to make sure it doesn't happen the next time. And that's when we get them into the preventative mindset. And then what really works for us is they get to know us, and when we send, you know, an information packet to them, they'll immediately accept it as valid. It's trusted source, and we can move faster then, because I can't take it many times in the early days, we were calling like the French gendarmerie, and they go, who are you? I don't even know you. I'm not responding to you. And how do I know this is legit? And that's a real problem, because we're giving them vital information that it's very timely. You know, within 510 minutes, it's no longer valuable, because, you know, the stuff is gone and you'll never see it again. So getting that kind of environment where they actually trusted you is a huge thing. We have a lot of ex law enforcement on staff that deal with these networks around the world and help help them understand how to engage directly with our technology. So well

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 17:32

as you're, I guess, on an educational campaign where you are trying to, I guess, tell these you know, different law enforcement officers and then different customers on how to prevent it so that education gets out there. And then also freight Tech has just exploded in recent years. So as you know, the education and the technology stacks continue to advance. Yeah, the criminal technology stack continues to advance as well. That's where

Barry Conlon: 17:55

they're really making gains. The criminals are infiltrating the technology faster than it's been developed. It's developed, it's unbelievable, like, especially things like a bol you know, one of the biggest, if you want to call it, tech breakthroughs, was the ebols, right? What people didn't realize that that was a golden opportunity for the criminal networks to go in and change them after they've received the load. I know of one event that happened over a period of two months where a criminal organization had infiltrated a semi legitimate company, let me call it that, because it was definitely criminal element as well, and they were actually charging this very well known High Street electronics distributor. And we all know and we all use and trust they were using that supply chain that they hit something like 64 different full truckload shipments over a two month period. And they didn't take the full load, but they take half of it. Change the bol to reflect, I'm delivering seven pallets. I should have delivered 14, you know, and will continuously do that till they were actually triggered. And what triggered it was that company's kind of cycle count, kind of, it was time to kind of do some checks. And like, checks and balances were nodding up. It turned out that don't that was probably well over a dozen full truckloads that were and nobody knew them. Off the top, nobody knew about it, and it was going on and on. It looked legit. We delivered on time. And they were paying these people. They were paying them invoices, and they were stealing and then when that was discovered, they just disappeared that Bo or that D, o, t number became obsolete, and they just go and they buy two more, and they're doing it again the next day.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 19:39

Well, that was another thing that I learned from from watching a couple of YouTube videos from your your overhaul channel, is that when the rate of the crime has increased, time wise, so drastically, where it's not just they're going to hit you once or twice, they're going to hit you hard and fast. And that's a recent trend,

Barry Conlon: 19:56

yeah, which is one of the things that we're we're we're talking about a lot in our in our track over there, in the in the in the panels we're running, is that change is inevitable. You cannot operate the way you operated before and in supply chain. You know, as well as I do, people hate change. They resist it. Getting them to adopt new procedures is the hardest part, but the shipper community now is starting to speak, and we represent them. Like, you know, I'm not saying I represent these companies, but you know, collectively, from an industry standpoint, like we, we have a lot of these companies that are coming to us and saying, Look, I'm just not accepting it anymore. You're handing my freight to a criminal. Yeah. It, and if change needs to be adopted, and that change means things might slow down or get a little bit more difficult. I am telling you right now, you're doing it, and the shippers are starting to change people's attitudes, because they're the big stick, right? They're the ones paying, and they're just not accepting this kind of ridiculous scenario where you are seeing people not even like I saw some of the horror stories I've seen, not even like somebody giving a Costco membership card as ID, you know, or some kind of a I'm like being accepted, and they're handing these people like a full truckload. It's ridiculous, because it's speed. Get things moving. Don't slow them down. Don't slow them down. You know, a lot of the, a lot of the change that we manage on a day to day basis is getting that process change where it doesn't slow it down in a meaningful way. What we're, I always tell people is, like, it's not a needle in the haystack. Problem. You want to find a haystack first. That's our job. Slow down on this one. Check that one out, because that's wrong. That's not who booked it online, and that's not who showed up to pick it up and giving people those insights. Now we're saying to them, okay, it's only one in 100 you have to check slow down on the ones that look anomalous, and they're the ones you really focus on, and then getting people to actually adopt these procedures and do that because there is change necessary. You have to have a new way of actually verifying what's on the ASN is what showed up on the dock, you know, the correct paperwork. And it's not just, you know, one identifier that can be mimicked and taken from the load board. It has to be something where, you know, this is the individual who is supposed to be picking up this load I'm handing out. And then there's the whole other continuum about, how do I protect that load when it's moving for three or 4000 miles? And these guys want it, and they know what to do, because they know what truck drivers do, legitimate ones, they stop in the first 50 miles, always they get their log books and everything else in order. They get their meal, maybe some rest, then they go off and they have you've given them enough time where they have that luxury. What happens as soon as they stop the criminals who have been following them? We deal with dozens of attempts like that every day where they're literally stepping into a vehicle that's open. No truck driver ever locks his vehicle and they never turn it off. So the criminals walk in with a vehicle. They're so simple. Yeah, it's taking candy off a child, basically.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 23:06

Do you find that in that with the fraud that's being perpetuated, is it different country to country? Yes, how? So give us

Barry Conlon: 23:14

some examples. It's, I'd say, the most sophisticated we're dealing with the moment, it will definitely be North American, with freight fraud practices that's now being exported. Some of the criminal organizations are multinational, and they're they never spot or leave behind a good idea that might work somewhere else. So we're seeing freight fraud identical to what we're seeing in North America, happening in the UK now, and Northern Europe, and it's only a matter of time before it goes everywhere. Now, in places like Mexico or Brazil, it's more blunt. You know, they bring a gun to the game. It's hijacked, not that. And hijack means they choose where to take it. The gorilla with the gun, right? So that's a whole different dynamic, like you need to have multiple layers of security. You might even have escorts, physical escort, you know, shepherding that load. But in most cases it's multi like North America, we have some, you know, maybe a shipper or a freight forward who'll quit and complain about one device that we're going to place inside a cargo that's going to be hidden. It'll allow us to recover it's stolen. They give out of it that in places like Mexico, you're putting like two dozen devices in, and nobody questions. It's like it's everywhere, like you have to take in transit risk seriously in places like Mexico, Brazil, Eastern Europe, you know, other places like South Africa, we operate in all these areas, so it's easier for us to kind of, I suppose, engage a customer there, because everybody accepts it. But in North America, it's kind of like, because it's a silent crime. People are kind of like, really, I have to do all this like, and where's the budget coming from? That's why, in most cases, the shippers fund the budget and but it's, you know, everywhere is different. The nuances are important. And, you know, understanding and studying, that's why we have such a an active intelligence branch. Their job is to study what's happening, what's different about it here, and then educate the industry, so the industry knows what to expect.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 26:07

Barry, how did you get started? How did what gave me the light bulb moment of starting overall.

Barry Conlon: 26:12

Well, my first trip was the military. So I was a tier one operator for about 12 years in Irish defense forces, and I left started with a company. Customers were saying, Look, my freights being stolen. What can I do about it? So I put together a business plan that led to my first. Star Club. I took that to America, 25 years ago, nearly 26 now, 2000 I sold that company to a fortune. 50 in about 2012 I couldn't stand corporate culture. Lasted two years. Got a year off of good behavior, and I started overhaul 10 years ago, next month.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 26:48

Wow, congratulations. I mean, the intelligence that you guys give out, it's so fascinating to learn. Every conversation that I have with overhaul, or every video I watch, I learn something new, and I I imagine that that's the culture within the company, is that you always have to stay on top of your toes and learn.

Barry Conlon: 27:04

And that's informing our strategy of growth now. So you know our m&a, we just recently acquired free verify that was a very, very interesting kind of technology stack that operates primarily in the automotive industry, and we had no presence there at all, and that's kind of, we call it mass market visibility tool, that's really exciting for us. So, you know, we acquired that company late summer last year, and that's been a wonderful experience. And they're based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. So I get and visit my my colleagues in Ann Arbor now pretty frequently, which is great, but no, look, it's a I call it the lot of investors are talking to me at the moment, are saying, Look, what's going on. There's so much happening in in supply chain, integrity. And I says, look, there's been a shift to risk. Risk is important, and it's becoming more important. And the reason for that is shippers, when they are concerned about the dollar value of a product being stolen or damaged, the biggest problem they have is they can't replace it. And when you can't replace the thing, you know you're talking market share now, because your competitor will, and like, if you're if you're talking about a cell phone that you can only get the competitors kind of handset. Like, there's, there's actually, there's actually data on this about how long somebody stays with that phone provider. It could be, it could be a generation. So you've lost that punter. Wow. So now that's why it's at the boardroom level, like, Why risk is important to a shipper. So No guys, we cannot be found to be want and we can't supply our customers with, you know, the tools they're looking for. And they don't get it from us, they'll get it from the competitor, and then they're gone. So market share is now, I think it's not the dollar value.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 28:46

It just sounds like it's a constant game of like, the chicken or the egg, like you just got a we call

Barry Conlon: 28:50

it the arms race with the criminal Oh, great, yeah. Like we know them intimately and we respect them. They're bad and they're terrible, but they're really good at what they do. And if you can study some of these bad guys, they could teach a class in supply chain. That's how good they are, right? And now, with that level of sophistication infiltrating electronic systems for your good or for their your bad, they're good. It's at a whole new level. They have to really understand. And we're launching like we're launching at this show, the first immutable BOL, so customers now can actually rely on the bol they're using and not be compromised with criminals, because it can't be. And they're taking that's what I mean by the arms race. We're constantly looking at what they're doing, new, that's new, and what's working, and then developing strategies against that. And we're not waiting to be reactive to them. We're trying to push it even further. But then they react to us. I have a video of a criminal organization in California when we launched a new electronic seal that spoke to a device that's inside the load, and you would know when somebody accesses the load, so that's our way of getting law enforcement there quickly. And you have a confirmed breach, they spent five hours. It was like a workshop, five hours under video by the LAPD, where they were literally trying to take everything apart to see how they will defeat this new piece of tech that's just been entered into the dynamic. So literally, like that's what these guys do all day. They figure out ways of breaching your current procedures and in but the sad thing is, in most cases, most kind of distributors or shippers or freight forwarders just make it too easy for them. They're not even like most of our customers, like, we have a very high retention rate of customers, like, well above 100% and they're with us because we've really built up a very impressive, hardened supply chain. So they don't they're not successful with them. But there's so many other ones that are not, you know, reinforced, and they just easy pickings. You know, it's low hanging fruit.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 30:55

I could ask so many more questions, but I we only have time for a couple of more. So I am curious, because it sounds like, well, not it sounds like supply chain has taken a seat at the boardroom table, but it also sounds like the risk portion of it is taking up the greater amount of the conversation. I'm curious where you Is there even a possibility to kind of see what the future looks like when it comes to preventing carnal crime?

Barry Conlon: 31:21

It's not going away, in fact, and that was one of our talk tracks in our event. It's going to. Escalate, it's going to require a combined collaborative approach, and that collaboration is not just the shipper, it's the freight forwarder, it's vendors, most importantly, it's law enforcement bringing all that together in a way that where our information sharing is at a much higher level and is actually, you know, providing value, particularly as for response kind of capabilities, that really has to change, because, like, we do a lot of this, but it's no way near at the level it needs to be to get law enforcement there quickly. And they know they will, we know they will respond when we call. And that's legislation too. Now in most cases, particularly in North America, the laws are already on the books, but the prosecutors are not enacting them, because it's property crime, and that has to change. And what we're seeing now, which is the really positive thing, is the lobbyists from the from the shipper side of things are now saying to these, you know, state entities, in most cases now there are federal but the state ones are really important, because you know, if you're operating and you're in Texas or in Tennessee, you're going to say, Hey, I'm losing here. I need your help. If you're not going to help me, I'm going somewhere else. And that that's really affected California. A lot of companies have moved out of California and they're coming to Texas because they're getting that kind of level of cooperation. And that's, that's, you know, pocketbook stuff, you know, like, it's getting people's attention, and it's but I do think there has to be a greater level of collaboration and understand that this is a this is a crime that's not silent. It really matters. It has huge impact on our daily lives, and people's lives are at risk now, you know, if you're talking about pharmaceuticals and stuff like that. So that collaboration approach has to happen, and has to happen at a faster rate than it is today. And because, you know, we think it's bad now, no criminal organization is going to turn away from this. It's just too profitable, and there's zero risk for them at the moment. So why would they? Why would they not get involved like you rob a bank in Texas, there's cash limits on the drawer. There's dye packs inside the cash you get, you might get 10 grand, maybe, if you're lucky, and everyone standing around you in the line is armed with a gun, so they might shoot you, and when you go outside the door, the door, the cop's gonna shoot anyway, because they've got the silent alarm for 10 grand. You can rob a million dollars worth of tech electronics, and nobody's gonna bat an island.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 34:00

So it's moved from Robin banks to Robin trucks. Why would you rob a bank?

Barry Conlon: 34:04

Yeah, it's insane, and that's the risk ratio that criminals rely upon. I'm not gonna put my life at risk, but I'm gonna go over here and a little bit of thought, a little bit of energy, I can get a million dollars, and I can actually sell it back into the supply chain within the next 24 hours at a profit.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 34:19

Well, this was a fascinating conversation. I mean, obviously there's a lot of education that goes on in this space, that continues to go on, and you guys are doing a fantastic job of letting people know what the landscape looks like and how you can be proactive, and then also use a company like overhaul to be reactive. But even though you consider that a failure if you're reactive, very prevention.

Barry Conlon: 34:45

Great. Thank you. That was great. I was enjoyable.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 34:47

Thank you so much. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of everything is logistics, where we talk all things supply chain. For the thinkers in freight, if you like this episode, there's plenty more where that came from. Be sure to follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast app so you never miss a conversation. The show is also available in video format over on YouTube, just by searching everything as logistics. And if you're working in freight logistics or supply chain marketing, check out my company, digital dispatch. We help you build smarter websites and marketing systems that actually drive results, not just vanity metrics. Additionally, if you're trying to find the right freight tech tools or partners without getting buried in buzzwords, head on over to cargorex.io where we're building the largest database of logistics services and solutions. All the links you need are in the show notes. I'll catch you in the Next episode in go jags. You you.