Overhaul’s Senior Regional Manager for Europe, Marco Cosentino, reviewed the latest data findings from the DACH region and shared his thoughts regarding the current trends for cargo theft reporting and potential consequences:
This is a very interesting post. Too often do we hear people in the industry trying to minimize the fact that cargo theft data coming out of Germany is some of the worst in Europe as a simple matter of “over-reporting” compared to other countries. What we do often forget instead is that cargo crime from Germany is also heavily under reported by itself; what we have available seems to be no more than 20 to 30% of the actual data, which means that the current situation in Germany is much worse of what’s already depicted.
This comes on top of other challenges to cargo security in the area, such as the police jurisdictions, and the difficulties with any operations that is spanning across two or more of them; there is often the feeling of working with different countries.
Also, let’s not forget how the central position, with both local manufacturing and inbound cargo coming in through the ports and then going out to the rest of the continent, makes it an ideal country for bands coming from all over Europe, as it allows them to target all the kind of goods – a problem shared with the neighboring Netherlands.
We already have observed the trend of many transportation (and even security!) managers underestimating this risk, and for me, it will always be strange how many companies might spend millions of euros for the security of their facilities, and then have no issues having their goods transported by the lowest bidder, often without any visibility and knowledge of where their goods are going through. This, united with the perception of what is and what is not safe being quite different than what the data is showing us, will always be a major factor in the lack of prevention that is so common in the industry – the consequences of which are clearly visible in the post above. Definitely a situation on which awareness needs to be raised.
For the full report that Marco illustrates from the snapshot above, please review here: Germany Cargo Theft Assessment 2023
