35,000 pints of stolen Guinness, 950 wheels of pilfered cheese: can the UK’s cargo theft crisis be stopped?

In August 2021, Mike Dawber, the UK’s leading detective in cargo crime, got a call from officers in Bradford CID. They were planning to search two warehouses that contained, in their words, an awful lot of suspicious goods. This was a job that required Dawber’s expert eye. He drove an hour from his home, in the unmarked police car that doubles as his office, and arrived to discover the description barely did it justice.
As soon as he walked in to the first warehouse, he noticed 17 pallets of golfing equipment. They had, he knew, been stolen three weeks before from a truck at Lymm motorway services, just outside Manchester. He reckoned they were worth about £1m. As Dawber continued his survey, he came across 18 pallets of Asics trainers, stolen three years before, at Warwick services. Then 14 pallets of lawnmowers: five years before, from a truck on the A1 at Colsterworth. He came across IT equipment, sportswear, high-end fashion, electrical goods, toasters, microwaves, beauty products. One pallet was simply labelled “Eyelash technology”. Dawber didn’t know what eyelash technology was, exactly, but he later learned that a pallet of it was worth more than £500,000.
Dawber did not need to consult the records to know much of this; in many ways, he is the records. Ask him, say, about the time someone tried to make off with a truck of Cadbury Creme Eggs, and Dawber will instantly tell you the date (11 February 2023), the location (Telford), the true market value of the eggs (£250,000, far higher than reported), the location where the thief had travelled from (Leeds) and where he was arrested (the M42). When Nottinghamshire police stopped the driver of a Mercedes Sprinter van on false plates a couple of years ago, with an amount of Martel cognac in the back that didn’t suggest stocking up for Christmas (2,300 bottles, worth about £250,000), their first call was to Dawber. He immediately identified that the goods had been stolen several hours earlier in Daventry, 80 miles away. The driver was arrested. The goods were returned. You may have drunk the cognac.
Dawber is 49, sturdy, with a broad Lancashire accent. He is a field intelligence officer for the national vehicle crime intelligence service (Navcis), a kind of FBI for wheel-based theft, based in Coventry. His job is to connect the 43 police forces around England and Wales, sharing intelligence and accompanying detectives on warrants when that intelligence leads somewhere. Within the industry, people speak of Dawber with something approaching awe. “He has so much knowledge in his head,” says Sharon Naughton, his boss at Navcis. If he doesn’t answer when she calls, she starts to fret. “He’s the only person with the answers.”
Dawber is a busy man. These days, organised criminal gangs aren’t after bullion, but baby formula, kitchen fittings, perfume, PS5s. “When I first joined the police 20-odd years ago, people were still holding up jewellery shops, banks or post offices,” says Dawber. “Your switched-on villains don’t do that any more, because if you get caught doing that, you’ll get 15 years. So they’ve moved on to less risky crimes.” Since 2017, when Dawber joined Navcis, the number of cases that reach him have more than tripled, to about 5,000 each year. When I first spoke with him last spring, he was investigating a case of stolen plastic drinking cups worth about £70,000, and laptops worth £250,000. It was a typical day. Two years earlier, he said, an entire truck of sex toys went missing. He was still trying to locate them.
Cargo theft operates according to the law of supply and demand. When a truck carrying 400 50-litre kegs of Guinness – the equivalent of 35,000 pints – was stolen from a logistics hub in Northamptonshire in December 2024, it was widely seen as the cause of a nationwide shortage. This wasn’t quite true – the truck was targeted because there was a shortage in the first place – but it only made the scarcity worse, which in turn only made the stolen Guinness more valuable.
The cost of living crisis has made food and beverages an increasingly attractive target, with thefts rising as much as 79% in 2024 according to one report. In October of that year, 950 wheels of premium cheddar were stolen in London, an incident soon dubbed “the grate cheese heist”. (Jamie Oliver asked the public to keep an eye out for “lorryloads of posh cheese”.) Last week, a truck carrying KitKats went missing after setting off from Italy. A spokesperson for Nestlé said criminals had “made a break” with more than 400,000 bars. In some ways, it’s the perfect crime. If stolen cargo isn’t found within the first few hours, it’s as good as gone. It re-enters the supply chain, and, soon after, the evidence will get eaten. At present, Dawber says, olive oil is a popular target. With the value of Italian extra virgin hovering around £10 a litre, the average truckload is worth about £250,000, making it more valuable than most wine.
When accounting for lost revenues, VAT and insurance costs, cargo crime is estimated to cost the UK economy about £700m a year. For freight companies, often operating on minuscule profit margins, the impact can be crippling. Insurance premiums rise with every claim. Excesses are regularly in the thousands. Many haulage companies have to absorb the costs and pay the customer for the goods lost.
For years, the industry has attempted to sound the alarm. One partial remedy, it argues, is maddeningly simple: make freight theft its own crime. (At present, it is categorised as “theft from motor vehicle”, the same offence as nicking a pair of sunglasses from a glovebox.) In parliament last year, Rachel Taylor MP introduced a bill that would do just this, meaning that sentences for criminals could be longer and accurate statistics on the scale of the crime could be collected. A second reading is due to take place next month.
The goods Dawber found in the Bradford warehouse showed just how easy cargo crime had become: a single gang had amassed a vast emporium of stolen goods. The goods had been “lagged” – stored while the gang waited for the heat to die down. Or, for some items, while waiting for buyers. And because it was all so easy to steal, the thieves had just kept stealing it. Only one arrest was made.
Nearly everything travels by truck. Air and sea play their part, of course, but at some point, goods will inevitably be whisked to their destination on wheels. If you’re reading this newspaper in print, it travelled by truck from printers in Watford, Oldham or Cardonald. If you’re reading this online in Britain, odds are your device hit the road at Felixstowe, where electronics from China come ashore.
When goods are on the ocean, packed away in shipping containers, they are more or less safe from theft. It’s when they are loaded by forklift, one pallet at time, on to a curtain-sided articulated lorry, no more than 16.5 metres in length and 2.5 metres in width, that they become vulnerable.
In its own quiet way, the invention of the curtain-sided lorry, in 1969, was as revolutionary to haulage as the tank was to warfare. Previously, loading goods was a laborious process, either in careful order into the back of a box truck, or individually lashed to the back of a flatbed. Now, with the simple release of tensioned tarpaulin, forklifts could load from both sides, in any order. As the value of the goods has increased, haulage vehicles have effectively become bank vaults on wheels, protected by no more than a PVC-coated polyester sheet.
About a quarter of all the theft Dawber sees comes from curtain-slashing. He has even come to recognise different groups’ signature slashes: the incision in the shape of the number seven of a gang looking for whisky, the letterbox cut of a crew after laptops, who peer through the flap like a nosy neighbour. In other cases, trailers can be stolen wholesale. The criminals are well organised. “They have networks that can get rid of goods and move it on for serious sums,” he says. “It’s mind boggling, the values, the volumes of thefts. It kind of knocked me on my heels when I came into the job.”
By his own telling, Dawber spends much of his life in motorway services. He travels about 30,000 miles a year and brings his own sandwiches. Yet a crime scene with a Starbucks has its benefits: it’s where he holds most of his meetings. When we first met, on a spring morning at Beaconsfield services on the M40, Dawber had already been there for hours, laptop on lap in car, working on a case involving high-end vacuum cleaners, 23 pallets of which had been stolen some hours before. He was due to meet a couple of leading industry figures a little later, and I’d been permitted to tag along.
Dawber is old school. Offenders aren’t criminals, but villains. Standout cases are “Match of the Day jobs” – a career highlight package in waiting. He has several mantras. A truck at rest is a truck at risk. To catch a cargo thief, you have to think like a cargo thief. He even met his wife, Louise, via cargo. Recently separated, Dawber had lost custody of the cooking equipment. Louise, too, was recently single, but had been left with too much kitchen stuff. Dawber bought a toaster, a microwave and a slow cooker from her. Within three months, Louise had joined them at his house, and they joke she only did so to get them all back. Her own, meticulously planned, cargo heist.
He likes to say his former job, as a rugby referee, informs his current one. When he’s called to a “hostile policing environment” – police code for complete crap hole – Dawber doesn’t fret or frown, but simply thinks of the mob of 100 angry fans that awaited him at Doncaster, making throat-slitting gestures as he left the pitch, and knows it could be worse.
It was in 2012 that Dawber realised that solving vehicle crimes was his true calling. As a Cheshire police officer specialising in vehicle theft, he was tasked with looking into a notorious Manchester gang linked to more than 70 thefts of farm machinery. The cases had all been investigated in isolation, so Dawber did his own cold-case review, poring over the evidence for each, revealing their MO – the areas they most frequently hit, the times they did so. A sting was set up. A police digger with a tracker was planted in a suitably vulnerable spot. Dawber likes to tell the story that, at the sentencing, the ringleader, resigned to his fate, paid his respects to the cops who had caught him. “You’ve done a good job with this one,” he said.
A typical raid goes something like this: in the dead of night, a spotter will enter a truck stop, while drivers are asleep in their cabs. They will go truck-to-truck, slashing open the sides to see what’s worth stealing, crawling under each to avoid the CCTV. Once a suitable target has been identified, accomplices will arrive in a side-loading vehicle – Sprinter-style vans with slide doors are common, though larger removal trucks are sometimes used. They will park alongside, as close as they can, cut a hole in the target truck to match their own side door, and quietly load from one to the other. From the outside, you’d never know a crime was taking place. Their feet won’t touch the ground. Drivers mostly realise in the morning.
A quick, clean score generally requires a truck with a free bay next to it. Cargo thieves can spend a lot of time essentially waiting for a parking spot. No one said it was glamorous.
Dawber often marvels at some of the things taken, the way their destination hints at the scale of the criminal enterprises. A few years ago, pallets of baby formula milk kept going missing – he later discovered formula was selling for about eight times the price in China, and the thieves had their own international supply chain. Yet, with limited police resources, no arrests were ever made.
At Beaconsfield, we decided to go for a walk around the trucks to stretch our legs before the meeting. Many bore patched-up slashes like scars. But freight theft doesn’t always require breaking and entry. Sometimes criminals dressed in company-branded hi-vis simply flag down a truck on its way to a distribution centre, spin a story about the warehouse being full, and tell the driver to unload in a “satellite” yard down the road. Then there’s exchange fraud, in which thieves take advantage of haulage exchanges – stations where drivers can bid for goods to carry on return journeys so they’re not driving empty – by arriving with fake documents for real companies. Entire lorryloads of cigarettes have gone this way, but also bathroom equipment. This happens about once a week in England and Wales.
There are trailer-hook-up thefts, in which entire trailers are stolen outright. Handily enough, these often sit fully loaded, and mostly unattended, in distribution centres over the weekend. During Covid, more than £1m worth of government-funded laptops destined for home schooling were hitched up to a stolen cab and driven away by three members of a Birmingham-based gang. This is also classified as theft from a motor vehicle, despite the theft being most of the vehicle.
High-value goods are often sold online – either individually, via sites such as Gumtree, or, using a recently formed company, en masse via Amazon marketplace. Dawber recalls seven pallets of perfume, worth about £1.5m, that went missing from a lorry in Kent and within 24 hours were listed for sale on eBay on accounts located in Essex, Luton, Watford and east London. It was easy to spot, as the perfume was yet to be released. As is so often the case, no arrests were made.
Other stolen goods reappear via the “grey market” – independent wholesalers either duped by fake documents or who don’t ask too many questions. A couple of years ago, a batch of barbecues meant for Tesco was stolen in Staffordshire, only to end up back on sale at Tesco, which had unwittingly repurchased its own stolen goods.
Attending the meeting at Beaconsfield was Michael Yarwood, managing director for loss prevention at TT Club, a global cargo insurer, and Ross Mendenhall, the group operations director for Extra MSA, a company that operates several key motorway service stations, including the one we were sitting in. In the US, Yarwood said, cargo theft was “off the charts” but the thieves there had different methods. Lately, they had been hacking into the driver software system and getting trucks diverted directly to them. Among the members of Yarword’s company, there were more than 400 losses of this type in 2024, compared with a handful of thefts from truck stops.
Mendenhall, meanwhile, lamented the dire state of the UK’s haulage infrastructure. By most estimates, there are twice as many trucks on UK roads than there are places for them to pull up. We’re about 11,000 parking spaces short, says Ashton Cull of the Road Haulage Association (RHA). With drivers forced to park up in laybys for their statutory rest, freight crime becomes even easier.
What we really need, Mendenhall said, is more service st