Thieves ring up to check what to steal
Page 19

If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
CRIMINALS ARE using new tactics to get insider information and target valuable loads.
Mark Hooper from Truckpol, the Metropolitan Police road freight crime unit, warns of a spate of truck crimes in which an operator has received a telephone call from someone purporting to be "head office" or "customer services" at another company.
The caller often targets someone junior in the company and asks them a series of questions about their delivery habits such as the identity of their manager, who takes care of deliveries and how they change delivery addresses. Thieves then to use this information to target specific operators and valuable loads.
-Some firms have even had calls made to get the driver's mobile phone number and bogus police officers claiming to be making enquiries about crimes in the area," Hooper reports.
"The long and short of it is that the criminal gets a load of information about the consignee and then all it takes is a couple of calls to the carrier or the driver by the thief who pretends to be the consignee to get the load redirected."