If you were a teen in the early 2000s, you'll remember the still not concluded movie series The Fast and the Furious. What started out as a series on car racing morphed into heists and then somehow a terrorism prevention squad. How? We try not to think about this. But AI has now ruined all the action scenes in the heist era. Instead of needing to jump onto the backs of trucks or taking off the entire door to not trip the alert connected to the secured lock, you can now just pick one up or reroute it with fake paperwork and IDs. Nerd-run gangs no longer have to live their lives a quarter mile at a time because they are now digitally infiltrating the supply chain instead.
Sadly, I'm too pretty for jail and will not be risking any jail time for the easy millions I could be making now. Supply chain news outlets are reporting on it and CEOs are looking at the increased losses on their balance sheets. Losses that show there's been a 1,500% increase in cargo theft since 2021, an estimated $35 billion annually, gone. Traditional systems can't keep up with how organized crime rings are operating. Companies that look like legitimate warehouses and online marketplaces are fake and specifically created to store and move stolen freight.
This got easier when everything went remote. Dispatchers moved overseas. Connections that used to happen face-to-face moved to email. And email, it turns out, is very easy to hack. Some syndicates infiltrate outdated security systems to read emails, insert fake documentation, and generate verified-looking warehouse credentials. So, here we are.
Sure, the DOJ charged the owner of OnlyFake, one of the largest fake ID websites on the internet. But the technology doesn't care. For $15 and 30 minutes, a neural network will hand you a fake ID indistinguishable from the real thing and you can run it on a local computer. AI-generated documents already make up 2% of detected fakes and that number is only going one direction...up.
The TSA has 500 inspectors dedicated purely to cargo security. Trucking's entire regulatory body, the FMCSA, has maybe 300 to 400 investigators total. For everything. So, yes. There's a gap. A big, trailer-shaped gap that organized crime is very happily driving through.
I'm sure you've seen those packages with barcodes or RFID tags. But a barcode that scans is not the same as a barcode that's real. The bad guys know the standard format. They make it scan on purpose. What they can't replicate is the encoding each state buries inside that barcode, built in partnership with DMVs since the '90s. Some companies are now scanning IDs in under 44 milliseconds and cross-referencing exactly that data.
In the meantime, I'll be waiting for the final movie in the still-unconcluded saga, dreaming up stories of AI heists.
This has a been A Geeky Production
