A lorry carrying Amazon deliveries between Germany and Spain lost around 4,000 parcels worth more than €193,000. It is still not apparent who stole it, when, or how six months later. Last May, the Riba-roja-based transport company that the American e-commerce giant utilises for most of its road freight in Spain told the news about the event. There is no sign of the thieves six months later. There is not even a hint of a crime, even though reports were made to the National Police in Torrent and Paterna.
It all started in March when a truck full of things that Amazon was going to send to consumers in Spain got to the BCN8 logistics centre in an industrial park in Sabadell. Levante-EMV spoke to several people who said that robberies of trucks that park overnight near these warehouses are widespread. This is the company’s seventh logistics centre in the province of Barcelona. “They don’t just go after cars that stop to sleep in highway rest areas anymore. They follow them to industrial parks, especially around warehouses and parcel distribution centres,” says a source who knows about these kinds of criminal networks.
This newspaper found out that the vehicle, which belonged to a Romanian firm, left the US corporation’s warehouse on the outskirts of Mönchengladbach at the end of March. The warehouse is called DUS4 since it is the fourth logistics centre in the Düsseldorf area. The driver took the customary route, which goes via the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, to get from one distribution centre to the other. They didn’t notice anything strange until they got to the loading docks of the Sabadell warehouse on March 30th.
The company’s monitoring system, which records the inside of the vehicles after they are loaded at the origin and before they are unloaded at the destination, seems to have helped them find out about the theft. Because of this method and the list of what was in each trailer while it was on its way, BCN8 workers found that at least 3,767 packages of different sizes and contents were missing. At that time, the end of March, it was not possible to figure out how much the lost goods were worth.
Amazon told the delivery company about the event. The company is based in Riba-roja and, according to its owner, “the company’s main carrier in Spain.” And that’s when things start to become confusing. The owner of the company says, “At that time, I didn’t have any trucks available because Amazon might hire you for six or seven trips in a week, then not order anything for two weeks. Of course, I had the trucks assigned to other trips.”
Subcontracted as many as four times
So, the corporation hired another company to handle the cargo this time from Paterna. This firm likewise couldn’t finish the trip for the same reason: they didn’t have any vehicles available to drive the route between Mönchengladbach and Sabadell on the day Amazon needed them to. The transporter from Riba-roja said that they had hired another transport business from Romania to execute the job, but that company “apparently also failed to do it and passed it on to other guys, also Romanian, like us and like the ones from Paterna.”
As soon as he got the message from Amazon, he told them about the situation. He went to the National Police station in Torrent to do it. The Paterna-based company went to the local police station just a few days ago to report the theft. The e-commerce giant, which ships about 1.6 million items a day around the world, was told that the stolen goods were worth between DUS4 and BCN8: €193,174. In both cases, the reports have been thrown out “for lack of a known perpetrator.” This is a standard practice when the perpetrator is unknown, and it is up to the police and/or the courts to find out when and where the theft happened and who did it. If this happens, the case could be reopened and the people responsible could be punished.
Author: Derek Appleton
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