Criminals buy haulage firms to steal lorryloads of goods, BBC finds

Criminal gangs are buying up transport companies to pose as lorry drivers and steal truckloads of goods, the BBC has learned.

We found evidence that a group of shipping companies were purchased using a dead man’s information.

One of the haulage companies was then unknowingly hired as a subcontractor by a haulage company in the UK. A manufacturer loaded goods onto one of the subcontractor’s trucks, and the goods were never seen again.

Alison (not her real name) runs a Midlands haulage firm that was duped by fake subcontractors and says it is “incredible” that “a gang could come in and target a company so recklessly”.

With freight theft in the UK rising from £68 million in 2023 to £111 million last year, the brazen tactic is just one way criminals are targeting hauliers who distribute retail stock and other supplies across the country.

Footage obtained by the BBC shows criminals breaking into delivery trucks, breaking into vehicles while waiting in traffic, breaking into warehouses by cutting the locks, and stealing entire trailers full of goods.

Drivers who frequently have to stop and sleep in their taxis throughout the night told the BBC they often wake up to find the curtainsides of their trucks have been cut off by criminals trying to get at the cargo inside, with designer clothes, alcohol and electronics among the most common targets.

“You have to be careful because it hits your wallet,” says John Redfern, a former security manager for a major supermarket. He said the cost of goods to the consumer will increase over time as more items are stolen.

The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) said transport crime was becoming “more sophisticated, more organised” and police forces needed to work with the industry to respond.

Scams targeting hauliers, including criminals using fake haulage companies, are on the rise in the UK, according to the police’s National Vehicle Crime Intelligence Service.

“Our industry is under attack,” says Richard Smith, chief executive of the Road Haulage Association. He says the industry receives reports every day of businesses being targeted by “highly organized criminal gangs” and police are warning them of a “recent growth” in much more sophisticated methods.

The fraud identified by the BBC appears to follow a pattern previously seen by Europol in mainland Europe, where “legitimate shipping companies on the verge of bankruptcy are bought up by organized crime groups” who “take large loads of cargo” and then disappear.

After Alison’s firm was targeted, officers working on her case said police were investigating similar crimes in other parts of the UK.

Alison’s removals company, which moves millions of pounds across the country every year, was subcontracted to a smaller removals company earlier this year. He says he sometimes does this when his trucks are busy or in the wrong location.

“They had insurance, they had operator licenses,” he says. “It looked great.” He says the truck arrives at the manufacturing company, a forklift truck loads the DIY products, and the truck drives off.

But what Alison and the manufacturers didn’t know was that the truck was using fake license plates. It disappeared along with cargo worth £75,000.

“The first thing we heard about it was that the destination company called us and said, ‘Where did our cargo go?'” Alison said. ‘ he asked,” he says. The subcontractor tried to call the company, but the number was disconnected.

So who bought the goods? To find out, we took a detour involving the identity of a dead man, a mysterious Romanian woman and a £150,000 Lamborghini Urus.

The company Alison hired was called Zus Transport. It had been sold by the previous owners a month before the theft; There is no hint that they were involved in any crime.

The BBC discovered that the takeover was financed by a bank transfer from a company owned by a UK-based Romanian truck driver named Ionut Calin, whose middle name is Robert.

We found a network of five transport companies, including Zus Transport, which was apparently acquired by Mr. Calin this year.

However, we have confirmed from Romanian authorities that Mr. Calin died in November 2024. This was months before his bank details were used to buy several companies and his name was used to register three companies with Companies House.

We have no reason to believe he was involved in a crime, and dozens of people on social media remember him as a good man who helped others in the industry.

Former owners of some trucking companies said they dealt with a man named “Benny” and not with Mr. Calin. So who was he?

We found her by researching the director of Zus Transport listed in Companies House records, a Romanian woman. Information about him is scarce, but we found a phone number for him. When we searched the number on WhatsApp, the profile photo of a young woman with a different name, driving a Lamborghini, appeared.

Her profile picture helped us identify her as a relative of Mr. Calin and the wife of a man named Benjamin Mustata. Mr Mustata and his wife were photographed buying a Lamborghini from a dealership in April, a week after the theft targeting Alison’s company.

When we showed Mr. Mustata’s photos on social media to the former owner of one of the shipping companies, he identified himself as “Benny”, with whom he had met in person to negotiate the sale of the company.

The phone number Mr Mustata used to rent a property in Coventry in 2023 was also used to arrange the collection of stolen goods by subcontractors who defrauded Alison. The same number was also used by “Benny” to purchase one of Robert Calin’s shipping companies using his name and bank information.

When we went to Mr. Mustata’s address to deliver a letter containing questions about his suspected involvement in the theft, we were told that he had moved to Romania.

This was wrong. We tracked him to Coventry, where he was selling luxury cars. Asked about Zus Transport, Mr Mustata said: “Go away.” He denied using the identity of a dead man to buy transport companies and Zus Transport to steal goods.

He admitted buying Zus Transport but said he did so on behalf of a relative and that he was not in control of the company at the time of the theft.

Mr Mustata said someone else had used Zus Transport’s name on the subcontracting platform and may have stolen the goods.

“The company is registered at my address. My own address. I live there. How do you think I do bad things to my own address?” he said.

He said the stolen cargo had “nothing to do” with him, adding: “It’s not my fault.”

Fraud lawyer Arun Chauhun reviewed the BBC’s findings and said the scheme to target Alison appeared “well-prepared”, involving identity fraud and deception of Companies House, the government body that registers limited companies.

He said he thought it was “the kind of nuisance that businesses can afford to hit” because they have insurance, but in reality such crimes “cause damage to individual lives, the lives of people who own businesses.”

But as for who was behind the crime, Mr Chauhun said: “I think they just think the system will never have the resources to catch up with us.”

Labor MP Rachel Taylor, who represents North Warwickshire and Bedworth, where around one in five people work in logistics, said the BBC investigation “reveals what I constantly hear from hauliers: increasingly sophisticated criminal gangs are having a huge impact on their business”.

He said it had “gone unrecognised for too long” and called for “a joined-up national policing strategy and greater resources to tackle this problem so we can put these organized criminals behind bars where they belong”.

Assistant Chief Constable Jayne Meir, the NPCC’s first lead on transport crime, said a new team at Opal (the police intelligence unit that tackles organized crime) would start targeting the issue next year.

But in the meantime, business owners like Alison say such crimes have a “huge impact”.

“We go home at night and don’t sleep,” he says. “Transportation jobs don’t make a lot of money and you just buy something like this and be out of a job.”