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Largest type of theft in the US is wage theft[1]. Workers lose billions every year to wage theft[2].

[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3916088

[2] https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-fro...

Civil asset forfeiture also ranks quite high, and above most property theft.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/09/06/s...

(I'm trying to recall / find a story which showed both the increase in seizures and a comparison with larceny / theft / burglary / robbery, which I recall being dwarfe by CAF.)

>But to put it in context, the rail company is reporting $5M in losses from theft last year, on $5.56B in revenue, or 0.1% of revenue. Not ideal but not massive either.

No, that's what they said. The exact quote was "the increase in crime cost the company at least $5 million last year" (emphasis mine)

>> Cybercrime damage cost is said to reach $6 trillion annually in 2021.

But US GDP is only 20.94 trillion. You're saying that the US is losing more than a quarter of its GDP to "Cybercrime damage"? I feel like the numbers you presented might be a bit inflated.

$6T is globally I believe

That's still a huge number! That's more than twice the GDP of Africa and 4 times the gdp of Russia.

Often carriers aren't responsible for lost goods. It's the shippers responsibility to purchase insurance for the items they send. It's a massive conflict if interest because the carrier has little incentive to improve security because they are not directly bearing the cost of lost or damages goods.

Pictures show.

Words explain.

Both are useful for those purposes.

Note that the railroad may have insurance on losses. If that $5m is post-insurance payouts, then it would understate property losses. There's also the losses due to missed deliveries, disrupted schedules, etc. (UP notes this itself in the letter shared here: https://nitter.kavin.rocks/CBSLAKristine/status/148211585221...)

Your points on white collar crime are well made. That's activity that performs poorly on camera.

It's interesting watching to DOJ chase facebook and basically ignore cybercrime. I include all the tech support and other scams that hit the elderly etc. Money mules, no enforcement there either.

A lot of these scams originate from outside the US though, so presumably it's a lot more difficult for the DOJ to go after them.

And yet tons of them involve shipping packages of money to US addresses and having a mule pick it up. So many times these scams will involve trying to convince their victims that the IRS only accepts payment via iTunes gift cards. Apple doesn't settle purchases with third parties instantly and yet if you were to call up Apple minutes after giving a scammer the gift card code you'll be greeted with the following response. https://youtu.be/-DT7bX-B1Mg?t=20

They still have every cent, they know the intermediary vendor who is laundering the money, and they'll still tell you to pound sand. All they've done is move the money from their right hand to their left and take their hefty cut in fees yet they pretend that clearly the scammers wanted those 500 limited edition seeds in some shitty Farmville ripoff and play dumb about the App developer who's very clearly in on the scam. They lose 30% to Apple and trying to convince victims that they can only accept payment in iTunes gift cards has to absolutely tank their conversion rate yet they still favor iTunes and Google Play because at the end of the day even after the huge fees they're still more likely to get more money than trying to transfer money through more traditional means.

DOJ still lets them get away with it. If they started charging entities facilitating fraud triple the fees they gained from it I'd bet Apple would start caring about it real quick.

This is largely false.

Almost all these scams involve various forms of money laundering to/from US institutions and through US persons. Plenty of routes for enforcement here.

Many / most including fraud carried out within the US against US persons using US infrastructure (including phones etc). Plenty of opportunities to go after the "bulletproof" hosts and those who accept terminations from them (SIP -> T-Mobile etc).

Plenty of opportunities to put MUCH MUCH more pressure on countries like India which tolerate this scamming of US persons.

Beyond that, new rules, for example, if you want to terminate overseas SIP calls into the US, you have to post a bond relative to your call volume. Folks can file claims against that bond. If the bond was not posted (or not checked), then the upstream provider is on the hook. Upstream providers can deny service to entrants who will not post bond and who originate call volumes internationally.

It's mostly the FTC chasing Facebook.

DOJ doesn't have jurisdiction outside of the US, but scammers are routinely extradited to the US to face criminal prosecution for their cybercrimes, and the US works in tandem with foreign governments to catch those criminals.

They really are going unpunished though even if they are being arrested:

"Union Pacific said last month in a letter to the Los Angeles District Attorney that it saw a 160% year-over-year increase in theft in LA county. The company claims that a December 2020 special directive issued by District Attorney George Gascón that changed how low-level offenses are prosecuted has contributed to the uptick.

Union Pacific said in its letter that in the last three months of the year it made over 100 arrests of "active criminals vandalizing our trains" in partnership with the LA police department and Los Angeles Sherriff department. But Union Pacific, which has its own police department with jurisdiction over the 32,000 miles of tracks it owns, said that even as it has expanded its security resources and partnered more closely with local law enforcement, the problem isn't going away. After being arrested individuals are released from custody within 24 hours, it said."

https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/14/economy/la-freight-railroad-t...

There's no violence to be seen in white collar crime. There's no single image that says "this is a society in decay, next they're coming for you" like those images from the train tracks. Obviously the problem is not an objective one (I'm sure USPS loses more mail a day than lost to train robbery in a year), it's one of trust in law and order.

The losses may not be a lot to the company but theft in general is having an effect on inflation which affects all of us.

This seems like whataboutism to me. It's possible to enforce the law against more than one type of crime, actually.

Why the whataboutism?

All crime is bad, just commenting on how the imagery gets our attention more than the dollar amount does.

I would venture to term it apologism