Overview
- Cook County Sheriff's Office investigators found two trailers at a Chicago-area truck yard containing about $1.3 million in stolen goods that had been reported missing to law enforcement.
- Officials said one trailer held roughly $300,000 in copper wire spools reported stolen from Pine Hill, Alabama, and the other contained about $1 million in data-center infrastructure taken from Jacksonville, Florida.
- Investigators located the copper trailer using its GPS tracker and found its license tags had been swapped for an Indiana plate, illustrating common tactics thieves use to hide stolen shipments.
- Experts and reporting note that servers and rack equipment are costly but hard to resell because they are specialized and serialized, while raw materials like copper remain easy to fence and quickly profitable for thieves.
- The case fits a larger trend driven by a boom in U.S. data-center building, a problem the Department of Homeland Security says contributes to as much as $35 billion in annual cargo-theft losses and that industry groups warn could grow without better tracking and tighter logistics controls.