North Arlington police caught two people red-handed on Porete Avenue, mid-transfer, as they moved pallets of frozen shrimp, salmon and other seafood from a refrigerated tractor-trailer into a box truck. The shipment was worth more than $273,000, and officers stopped the operation before any of it could be driven away.
According to theobserver.com, officers discovered two people actively transferring pallets of frozen seafood from a refrigerated tractor-trailer into a box truck on October 3. The outlet reports the cargo consisted primarily of frozen shrimp, along with salmon, conch meat and branzino, totaling roughly 29,000 pounds. Daily Voice identified the man taken into custody as 18-year-old Jonathan Pollaguari of the Bronx, who arrived with a juvenile in a 26-foot box truck to carry out the transfer.
How the Scheme Allegedly Unfolded
Investigators say the tractor-trailer driver had received phone calls and text messages from someone falsely claiming to represent the freight broker responsible for the shipment. That person instructed the driver to divert a portion of the load to North Arlington, the report states. Investigators later determined the individual directing the transfer had no affiliation with the actual freight broker and had allegedly impersonated a company representative in an effort to fraudulently obtain the shipment.
Officers moved in before the cargo could be removed from the area, stopping the theft outright. Pollaguari and the juvenile were taken into custody without incident, per the same account. Neither the identity of the person who allegedly posed as the broker representative nor the shipment's intended destination has been established in available reporting.
Charges and Summonses
Pollaguari was charged with second-degree theft by deception, second-degree false representation, second-degree conspiracy, and first-degree employing a juvenile in the commission of a crime. He was also issued motor-vehicle summonses for driving without a license, failing to possess an insurance card and operating an uninsured motor vehicle. The juvenile's identity, charges and case status were not disclosed in the report.
Part of a Bigger Pattern Hitting New Jersey
The North Arlington case lands amid a documented spike in cargo theft across the state. Verisk CargoNet recorded that New Jersey incidents jumped from 27 in the first quarter of 2025 to 59 in the first quarter of 2026, a 119 percent increase, according to CargoNet. Nationally, the firm logged 767 supply-chain crime events across the U.S. and Canada in that same quarter, with food and beverage remaining the top target category and seafood theft climbing sharply within it.
CargoNet has flagged impersonation schemes like the one alleged in North Arlington as a maturing, systematic tactic rather than an isolated trick. The firm estimated nationwide cargo-theft losses reached nearly $725 million in 2025, a 60 percent jump from the prior year, and expects impersonation-based fraud exploiting legitimate carrier identities to remain central to the crime trend in coming quarters.
Similar schemes have surfaced elsewhere in the Northeast. Eight people were charged earlier this year with allegedly impersonating shipping carriers in a multimillion-dollar theft operation that prosecutors say stole nearly $5 million in goods from logistics sites in Pennsylvania, Virginia and New Jersey, diverting them to New York City for black-market sales, as reported by Insurance Journal. That same report describes a $400,000 lobster-meat shipment apparently stolen from a Taunton, Massachusetts cold-storage facility by someone posing as a truck driver for a legitimate freight carrier, and a New York man arrested in February over an alleged theft of 33,750 pounds of frozen snow crabs worth $325,000 from a Worcester warehouse.
