A 24-year-old truck driver is in the Allen County Jail after police say he tried to pick up a load of copper wire worth about $115,000 from an Indiana freight facility using a commercial driver's licence in another man's name — a pickup that fell apart when warehouse staff could not verify his documents and the real trucking company warned that its email had been compromised.
Source: WANE 15 via CDLLife
The attempted pickup happened earlier this month in Allen County, in northeastern Indiana, according to WANE 15 reporting carried by CDLLife on November 9. Police say Arshdeep Singh arrived at the freight company claiming to be a man named Brar Kavy, and presented a CDL in that name to collect 22,740 pounds of copper wire.
Employees at the facility tried to verify the CDL and the truck's registration and were unable to do so. The facility had also received a warning from the trucking company Singh allegedly claimed to work for, notifying the shipper that the company's email had been compromised. Staff turned Singh away without the load.
The attempt did not end at the dock. Flock camera systems in the area captured the semi truck leaving the facility and driving to a truck stop at Indiana State Road 13 and Interstate 69. Officers ran the plates on the semi and found they were registered to a stolen trailer, according to the reporting.
When police approached him, Singh told officers that a friend had asked him to pick up the load because the friend was sick, according to the police account reported by WANE 15. He also told police, in that account, that the friend had instructed him to change the plates, the trailer unit number and the company logo so he could pick up another load in a nearby town. Those statements are Singh's account as reported by police; the underlying theft attempt remains an allegation that has not been tested in court.
Investigators then found that Singh held a CDL from California, but that it had been disqualified. He was arrested and charged with attempted theft, a Level 5 felony; identity deception, a Level 6 felony; and operating a commercial motor vehicle while disqualified, a misdemeanour. He is being held in the Allen County Jail.
Why copper wire, and why fake pickups
The method described in Allen County has a name in the freight industry: a fictitious pickup. A crew compromises or spoofs a carrier's email, books a real load under the carrier's identity, and sends a driver to collect it before the paperwork catches up. Copper is a favoured target because it is valuable by weight, easy to resell as scrap and hard to trace once it is melted down. The cargo-theft tracking firm Verisk CargoNet has reported that thefts of metals jumped 77% in 2025, driven largely by copper.
Two other recent cases show the same pattern, and both are separate from the Allen County arrest. On October 7, Lancaster County deputies in Nebraska stopped a semi on Interstate 80 near Lincoln and found about 44,000 pounds of copper wire worth an estimated $250,000; the load had been picked up in Chicago for delivery to a recycler in Carter Lake, Iowa, and the sheriff's office said the same shipper had lost four loads worth more than $1 million this year in the same fashion. In a federal case in North Carolina, an HSI affidavit alleges that a driver used a forged Texas licence in the name of Bollywood actor Sunny Deol to pick up more than $250,000 of copper wire from a Shelby metals plant in May, on a load booked to Fort Wayne, Indiana. The drivers in those cases are charged or accused, not convicted.
Facility staff tried to verify the driver's CDL and registration before loading; the real carrier's compromised-email warning reached the shipper in time; and camera systems tracked the truck after it left. Industry guidance is consistent: call the carrier back on a number you already have — not one in the booking email — verify the driver's licence and the trailer's plates and unit numbers, and hold the load when anything does not match.
For Punjabi and other immigrant truckers who run the I-69 and I-70 corridors through Indiana — and for the small carriers around Fort Wayne and Indianapolis that haul metal and machinery loads — cases like this one are why pickup checks keep getting stricter. A disqualified CDL is itself a serious problem in the current enforcement climate: a driver whose licence has been disqualified cannot legally operate a commercial vehicle at all, and being caught doing so adds a criminal charge on top of the licence consequences.
What happens next: the case will proceed in Allen County's courts, where prosecutors must prove the attempted-theft and identity-deception charges. No court date was included in the reporting available on Monday. The charges are allegations, and Singh is presumed innocent unless and until he is convicted. Awaaz Punjab will follow the case as court records become available.