$400,000 of Lobster Was Stolen and the FBI Is Trying to Track It Down

Talk about being just plain shellfish.

Sophisticated thieves have stolen $400,000 worth of lobster en route from Massachusetts to Costco stores in Minnesota and Illinois, Dylan Rexing, president and CEO of Rexing Companies (the Indiana-based freight broker overseeing transportation the lobsters) confirmed to Boston.com. This is just the latest in a string of shellfish heists bedeviling the Northeast where lobster, crabs, and oysters have gone missing in recent weeks.

“This theft wasn’t random,” Rexing told Boston.com about the lobster hijacking. “It followed a pattern we’re seeing more and more, where criminals impersonate legitimate carriers using spoofed emails and burner phones to hijack high-value freight while it’s in transit.”

The 40,000 poundsof lobster was originally picked up from a facility in Taunton, Mass., on December 12, but within a few hours, thieves had turned off the GPS, raising concerns with Rexing that the crustaceans had been intercepted. The company confirmed the theft on Sunday, saying it was working with the FBI on leads, but that no suspects had been identified of yet.

“In this instance, we hired someone we thought was legitimate, but the legitimate carrier company was being impersonated by someone else in a very sophisticated way,” Rexing told USA Today.

On top of this lobster heist that’s grabbing headlines, a load of crabs being shipped from a cold storage facility in Massachusetts also went missing on December 2, The Boston Globe reported. Additionally, Maine’s Department of Marine Resources announced in early December it was looking for $20,000 worth of oysters that had been stolen from an aquafarm in late November.

While supply chains have long been the target of thieves (see: train robberies in the old west), the tactics being used to attack them are getting more sophisticated, MIT professor Yossi Sheffi told the Globe. The director of the university’s Center for Transportation and Logistics said criminals are posing as legitimate members of a supply chain to intercept shipments and that seafood is ripe for targeting by criminals because the products are less traceable than something like a shipment of televisions, where each item has a barcode.

As for the location of the $400,000 worth of lobster, Rexing can’t know for sure, but he told the Globe, that it “likely went to Boston, or N.Y.C. to a seafood market and sold for .50/cents on the dollar.”

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