Unique flavors of Kit Kats, sold by a Japanese company called Bokksu, have been all the rage. Customers from all around the world are obsessed with these unusually flavored sweets, looking for limited editions and even auctioning them off for good money. Danny Taing, the founder of Bokksu, had planned a shipment of around 55,000 Kit Kats. These precious candies had landed safely in California, but had suddenly become a target.
A freight broker by the name of Shane Black, paid about $13,000 by Bokksu, posted this trucking job, and someone called Tristan, with the company HCH Trucking, accepted this job, emailing Black a while later that he had picked up the first container. Seems legit, right?
Wrong. After a good while of no communication from “Tristan,” Black started to get suspicious. He contacted him and asked about the condition of the Kit Kats and where they were. After “Tristan” claimed that it had broken down and wouldn’t be able to make it 400 miles to New Jersey, he then said that he could drive the 2,400 miles back to California. Black now knew something was horribly wrong. He called HCH Trucking, the company that Tristan supposedly was with. A good deal of chaos had erupted in the background of the call, and the representative said that there was no “Tristan” with HCH Trucking.
Unsurprisingly, Tristan turned out to be a scammer.
Strangely, though, Tristan never received any money. The shipping fee was only due by delivery, so it didn’t seem like a very profitable scam. Black believed himself to be extremely lucky. After further investigation, it turned out that these sweets had never left California. They had simply been left on ice to rack up a lot of storage fees.
After handing these candies over to yet another company (and another, and another), these Kit Kats had made no further progress to their destination. It was a scam followed by another scam and yet another scam. By this point, Bokksu had fired Shane Black.
This fraud isn’t the first of this kind. “Fictitious pickups” like this have been happening for a good while now. Strategic cargo theft is up around 700% this year. More and more shipments are either getting lost or being held hostage. As Black says, “I do feel cheated, I just don’t know who is doing the cheating.”
