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It happens all the time. I work in logistics, it's unbelievable how much general criminality and fraud there is in this industry.

The scenario you outlined is not all that common. There are much more sophisticated scams. What I see the most often are disclosures of load information and pickup numbers to bad actors (e.g. via social engineering).

When you roll up to a facility with a truck, you need to provide information from the bill of lading, and the key piece of data is the pickup number, which is basically like a PIN for the shipment. If that gets into the wrong hands, then someone else can show up at that facility, pose as the carrier, and get loaded with the goods. It's quite low risk during the operation because there's no hijacking or anything else obviously criminal happening. People will literally load the thief's truck.

> While probably harder to find a no-questions asked buyer, the price premium on GPUs is a lot higher than some consoles.

I'd go further than that. A no-questions-asked buyer for a console merely suspects there's shenanigans afoot, and will expect a considerable discount off the sticker price. A no-questions-asked buyer for server GPUs almost certainly knows for a fact there's shenanigans afoot, but is likely to pay a premium over the sticker price anyway.

This type of thing is where a lot of prescription drugs that hit the black market come from.

The manufacturers of drugs are highly regulated.

The prescribers of drugs are highly regulated.

The disbursers of prescription drugs are highly regulated.

The shippers; not so much.

There's a good reason the mob likes logistics companies.

Wouldn't at least some shipping companies have the technology to track their trucks pretty closely nowadays?

My wife worked for a woman's health and beauty company that sold a lot of perfume and cologne, and their trucks would get ripped off all the time.

Are there not commercial equivalent of AirTags that can be hidden into pallets to track things?

> Guy was convinced the driver was on the take and would tip off someone about the juicy hauls.

Most logistics companies operate on shoestring IT budgets, and yet their software systems are juicy targets for organized crime, just like real estate companies.

This was a central plot point in The Fast and the Furious (2001)

Yeah, I would guess the driver is one who tips them off. Goes to some plausible location, gets out and takes a long enough lunch or bathroom break and then bam! “Omg someone stole this while I wasn’t looking”.

> probably harder to find a no-questions asked buyer

Is it ? with all the news this week about dummy servers and other tricks to bypass export controls, it seems there would be many no questions asked buyers abroad.

Am reminded of the premise of the first The Fast & Furious movie.

Heh, a play straight out of the movie Goodfellas

Can xboxes still play games without connecting to the internet?

I knew a UPS logistics guy, who told me (20 years ago) that an entire 30+ foot UPS trailer full of brand new laptops simply disappeared from a warehouse.

"pull whole semi trucks over as they left the Port of Long Beach and taking everything" what does that mean?

How did you sell that many units once you had them?

This sounds like The Fast & The Furious.

$11m is like a truckload of diapers. Or diesel.

I was wondering if there'd be jokes about the price inflation on GPUs.

They were not just misplaced. They can't find the truck and are investigating it as grand theft.

I usually have two options. FOB origin, where I assume ownership when the item leaves the seller’s dock. FOB destination is more expensive, but the seller maintains ownership until the item is delivered to my choice of destination.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOB_(shipping)

I always pay for FOB destination when ordering high value items. I bought two 250kVA UPSes from Eaton and one of the pallets tipped over on the truck.

The 2% I paid for FOB destination meant Eaton delivered another 250kVA UPS at their cost. Unsure if Eaton was made whole by the shipper or not.

This, exactly. There's a pretty good chance this is all on the buyer, by contract.

Brilliant. You're hired ;)

There's a lot more than just this incident, and not just GPUs.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/data-cen...

Maybe there's going to be a GTA 6 mission based on this eventually..

USPS accidentally delivered a bunch of classified military documents to my parents house when I was a kid. Some government official came out to personally take them back and thanked my parents profusely for returning them.

A classified F-35 component was shipped using UPS and it somehow ended up in China

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/24/chinaf-f35-components-hong-k...

In the early 00s I worked in print production and we printed a ton of material for the DoE. Their own employees would give us classified documents to print into binders for presentations/meetings all the time. We were basically a Kinkos...

UPS also somehow delivered stealth F35 Parts directly to China... no espionage required

Well, it's an interstate commerce incident, which is squarely within the FBI's purview.

their insurance doesn't give a fuck

When the company doesn't care, the insurance still cares.

When the police don't care, the insurance still cares.

Insurance always cares.

> 2/ why would the FBI get involved in local police matters?

Because as far as the US government is concerned, GPU technology is an export-controlled, somewhat sensitive item. Like non-nuclear components for nuclear weapons, in a way.

Yeah, the FBI is busy felatios for Binance and their billion funny-dollar coins!

obviously not by the pallet. but you wouldn’t fill a ford transit van.

They would easily fit in a Wagon Queen Family Truckster.

Like iPhone buyers if they don’t have a choice what are they going to do?

Typically it's a bit harder than that as not every shipment is millions of dollars in stuff.

My father was a transportation manager for years, and his first rule is when expensive shipments are targeted and inexpensive are not it's an inside job.

> 11M really is not enough to suspect a conspiracy of this scale.

That's how they fool the public, and people almost always take the bait. The above "$11M" is just one of many; the rest have not been discovered yet.

yeah seriously, this is just a Tuesday afternoon for Ziggy Sobotka

The big conspiracy is not $11m of hardware going missing in domestic US, its everyone from Jensen Huang to Trump knowing Huang's girlfriend was a Chinese spy and several mysterious shell companies with a front office that she was connected to in Singapore buying billions of dollars of chips. At least based on reporting so far.

edit : oh and possibly Lutnick and Nvidia covering it up

So perhaps there's another shoe to drop in terms of Nvidia (the DOJ case), and maybe Trump throws Lutnick under the bus when the heat piles on

You can bet that Trump es making money in this. ([edit] not in this incident specifically, but in the whole Nvidia situation). Otherwise he’d be complaining loudly right now.

The GB202 RTX 5090 was discontinued, which had 32GB of DDR7 and was subject to export controls. Coincidentally, the GB202 RTX Pro 5500, which has 84GB of DDR7 suddenly was able to be produced and is somehow compliant with the export controls.

I'm not sure how to square this against there not being some funny business with the export controls.

Bypassing export controls is not this simple. In this case, it was the commerce secretary who slow rolled enforcement, likely due to some form of quid pro quo knowing the people involved and even extending to the $25 million ballroom donation..

They had to get around other Federal oversight that was trying to enforce the export controls. Bessent clarified as much on CNBC earlier today.