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I was talking to a guy who worked in logistics. He said “vanishing” was a common problem for high dollar items. He had recently had a shipment of Xboxes, the driver had specifically been told, “Do not stop, keep driving, make the assigned times”. Of course, the driver went off book, went somewhere else, and when he got back to the truck, magically a bunch of the order was missing. Guy was convinced the driver was on the take and would tip off someone about the juicy hauls.

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

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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.

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That was exactly how that Canada gold heist happened. Thieves had arranged fake documents and the staff helped load $20 million in gold bars onto the truck.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Pearson_International_...

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Food fraud is also rampant. Stuff like olive oil is commonly fake or much lower quality than advertised. Its something like 20% of all food items are fraudulent in some way or another.
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I worked with an Insurer many years ago, produce and Nuts were one of their largest thefts. Easy to fence the goods when there isn't a serial number.
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See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Canadian_Maple_Syrup_Hei...

You can't really dust for maple syrup.

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That is different type of scam though. My favorite is seafood - if you are buying already fileted and it is not salmon or tuna - there is solid chance you won't even get the same species.
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Look up the CoolKicks scandal. A sneaker reseller worth tens of millions was caught paying off people at Nike's warehouses to swap shipping labels and get items shipped to them instead. These were unreleased and rare shoes worth millions. It took the FBI months to catch them.
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Around 2012 or so a client was building out a bunch of new database servers and had purchased fusion-io cards for them, which I think were going for something like $20k each. Well, the carrier never showed up on the day we were supposed to get them at the DC. I always assumed someone looked up the price, saw $100k+ worth of hardware that could be stuffed in a tote bag and decided to never show up to work again.
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If it happens with KitKat, I can imagine happening with high end GPUs https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterlyon/2026/03/30/chocolate-...
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> 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.

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Another reason why they are cheap is because Xbox will ban the consoles once they know they were stolen. GPUs on the other hand don't have a remote kill switch after being stolen.
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Don't give them ideas
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Given current market tends, if that becomes more frequent the likelihood of consumers actually getting GPUs goes up, as these will at least end up on various markets
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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.

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I worked at one of these places in college. Everybody had layers and layers of processes to make sure the shipment of controlled substances weren't tampered with. Because like you said the shipping companies were mostly immune to consequences from that. They'd wash their hands of the bad actors and move on. But it was seen was our fault if it happened and we didn't find it. Because of course we could be in on it and our not finding it could be part of the ploy!

In one a Fedex driver and conspirators would repackage a large shipment of painkillers. They'd take a single bottle from the a few boxes on each pallet and seal them back up in such a way that was very hard to spot.

Another time they'd take like 10% of the pills out of a bunch of bottles.

Many times the driver would get lunch and the truck would be stolen. Like once a year.

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I used to think this until I read that "supplements" contain real sildenafil.
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I've heard that the main reason they can be dangerous is because they can contain way too much.
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Supplements are pretty much unregulated, and can have some fairly scary ingredients. The regulators generally don't mess with them, until someone (usually multiple someones) has a problem.
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Lots of dodgy nutritional supplements out there. Look for NSF Certified Safe for Sport products to be sure of what you're putting in your body.

https://www.nsf.org/knowledge-library/importance-nsf-certifi...

And buy direct from the manufacturer. If you order through a reseller like Amazon then there's always a risk of getting counterfeit products if someone tampered with the supply chain.

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Wouldn't at least some shipping companies have the technology to track their trucks pretty closely nowadays?
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They do. But the LTL trucks are easy to load and unload.

So you have tracking devices in the cab, the trailer, the pallets, and the boxes, and things STILL disappear.

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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.
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was there a general region where this happened more frequently that doesn't look like a heat map of the general population? I'm thinking specifically about east coast crime family tropes here
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Are there not commercial equivalent of AirTags that can be hidden into pallets to track things?
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> 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.

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This was a central plot point in The Fast and the Furious (2001)
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That was too dramatic. Crossbows, etc. If anything the driver is probably cut in and involved. Thieves randomly picking out the truck with $11M worth of GPUs just seems implausible (or trucks just get robbed left at right all the time, the yeah, there is a chance one time they’ll hit high value cargo).
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I much prefer the train heist from Breaking Bad
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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”.
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Why aren't they putting cameras on every inch of the truck and immediately call law enforcement? Or are senders cheaping out on shipping
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The ideal amount of fraud is greater than zero.

Putting a bunch of technical compliance controls in place to stop the one-percent of bad actors is going to increase friction for everyone else.

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What form does this friction take?
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They will probably re-evaluate after this. Another thing is to send additional security with a trailing car. Hopefully assigned at random so it can't be someone connected with the driver. I know someone was shipping shelled walnuts and they did that as a semi full of those things can be in the many hundreds of thousands of dollars/euros in value.
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> 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.

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Heh, a play straight out of the movie Goodfellas
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Am reminded of the premise of the first The Fast & Furious movie.
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Can xboxes still play games without connecting to the internet?
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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.
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In my somewhat misspent youth, we used to steal VCRs and high end DVD players (gosh I feel old now). We started small, but eventually escalated a bit to teaming up to pull whole semi trucks over as they left the Port of Long Beach and taking everything. I’ve since reformed but just illustrating that it’s always been an issue. Then DVD players and VCRs, now GPUs.
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"pull whole semi trucks over as they left the Port of Long Beach and taking everything" what does that mean?
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Have you pre-ordered GTA-VI?
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How did you sell that many units once you had them?
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This sounds like The Fast & The Furious.
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Yeah, that's what it is.
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Working in big tech has completely torpedoed what I consider to be a lot of money. $11M is pocket change to them.
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$11m is like a truckload of diapers. Or diesel.
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It could be an order as small as two NVIDIA NVL72 systems.
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I was wondering if there'd be jokes about the price inflation on GPUs.
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Unfortunately this isn't one. $5.7m is a reasonable estimate for one of those systems.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

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Looks like I replied to the wrong comment. Should have been: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50489423
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It feels like no... I worked in a cement plant warehouse once where a small bin of misplaced electronics was like $2M. It feels like the amount of shrinkage in electronics shipping and warehousing is probably enormous, it's just more sensational to report on it for NVIDIA right now.
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Yea was going to say that's like 200 H100s. Which is a lot. But barely noticeable on an nvidia scale.
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The expected merchandise value of a loaded truck picked at random is ~$35,000. Armored trucks that transport cash rarely carry more than $1 million. So yes, it's a lot and most likely a targeted theft.
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With today's prices, that's maybe enough 5090s for a proper LAN party.
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6 pallets is not a lot to go missing. could be theft, could be somebody put them in the wrong rack when they unloaded a truck.
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They were not just misplaced. They can't find the truck and are investigating it as grand theft.
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i've definitely worked in places where people lost whole trucks. yeah, it was probably theft, and they're right to investigate that.

the post i replied to was asking about scale, and even if it was "definitely theft", 6 pallets is still a lose-able amount.

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No idea about logistics, but my cheap retro game console went from 0.7kg to 0.002 gram overnight at the depot. I thought it was oddly light when I took the box from the shop counter, and was very disappointed when I opened it.
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For California? No. For civilized areas, that's a lot! Biggest haul I've heard about recently was 500k of copper from a truck and made the news in multiple outlets. I'm sure we don't hear about most of these incidents in the news, though. All parties involved are not interested in publicizing these events.
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