Exposing Illegal Supply Chains: A Two-Part Intelligence Brief

Today’s supply chains are more connected and exposed than ever. While organizations focus on efficiency and compliance, many overlook the deeper threats hidden in the physical infrastructure and digital platforms that move goods around the world.

Illicit actors are exploiting vulnerabilities within these supply chains to divert products, insert counterfeits, bypass regulations, and reach consumers through unauthorized channels. These aren’t isolated incidents, they’re part of structured, often cross-border networks designed to operate undetected.

In this two-part series, we explore how intelligence-led investigations help organizations uncover and disrupt illegal supply chains on both fronts:

• Part 1: The Physical Realm – Understand how threat actors exploit logistics hubs, distribution channels, and enforcement gaps to compromise assets, and how intelligence helps reveal who’s behind it.
• Part 2: The Digital Realm, Learn how digital infrastructure is used to promote, distribute, and monetize illicit goods and services, often operating in plain sight on search engines, marketplaces, and social media.

Whether you work in pharmaceuticals, logistics, electronics, or consumer goods, protecting your supply chain requires more than tracking, it requires visibility into the actors, networks, and tactics driving illicit operations.

Part 1: 

Exposing Illegal Supply Chains: Understanding How Illicit Activity Moves Through the Physical Realm

Modern supply chains are designed for efficiency but are not always built for visibility. As global operations scale and decentralize, organizations face a growing challenge: physical supply chains are being exploited by illicit networks that operate beneath the radar.

From theft and diversion to counterfeit insertion and unauthorized distribution, these risks aren’t random. They’re coordinated, repeatable, and often cross-border. What they have in common is that the actors behind them remain unknown, untracked, and unchecked.

This blog explores how intelligence helps organizations expose those actors and better protect the assets, people, and routes that keep supply chains running.

What Do Physical Supply Chain Threats Look Like?

Illicit actors exploit weaknesses at every level of the supply chain. Some of the most common threats include:

• Cargo theft: Often linked to surveillance, insider knowledge, or repeat offenders targeting specific assets or brands
• Product diversion: Legitimate goods intentionally routed to unauthorized markets, creating gray-market leakage
  Counterfeit insertion: Illicit goods enter the supply chain disguised as originals, often via third-party distributors
• Regional fraud rings: Local groups exploiting poor controls at warehouses, ports, or last-mile delivery hubs

These risks exist across industries, from pharmaceuticals and electronics to luxury goods and food & beverage. The challenge is not just spotting a missing shipment, it’s knowing who is behind the activity and where they might strike next.

Why Intelligence Is Key to Asset Protection

Traditional loss prevention tools offer only partial answers. They detect symptoms, not causes.

To uncover illegal physical supply chains, you need a framework that connects:

• Incident history to behavioral patterns
• Geography to recurring actors
• On-the-ground intelligence to broader networks

That’s where structured investigative intelligence comes in.

Real-World Applications

Organizations across sectors can apply this model to protect their physical assets by:

• Monitoring high-risk zones with structured incident data and behavioral signals
• Identifying repeat actors or devices across different facilities or events, helping prevent future incidents
• Creating regional risk heatmaps for logistics, compliance, or security teams
• Correlating incidents to operational patterns or gaps

This type of intelligence is beneficial for:

• Retail and logistics companies facing organized cargo theft
• Manufacturers seeing repeated diversion in specific markets.
• Brands losing control of physical distribution through unauthorized resellers

Case Study: Cracking Down on Organized Retail Crime in the U.S.

Over 36 months, a major U.S. retailer faced persistent theft targeting distribution centers and in-transit shipments. AKTEK Integrated Services (iS) analyzed 5,000+ incidents and layered that data with geolocation intelligence to identify suspicious device behavior across dozens of cities.

We discovered:

• Repeat presence of suspicious devices at multiple theft locations
• Clear movement patterns of potential threat actors
• Hotspots of high-risk activity around major distribution zones

This intelligence was not theoretical, it generated targetable watchlists, hotspot maps, and lead signals that helped inform enforcement, operational changes, and loss prevention planning.

Read the full case study →

How AKTEK Supports the Mission

Protecting the physical supply chain requires more than locks, audits, or after-the-fact reporting, it demands intelligence. At AKTEK, we help organizations shift from reactive incident logs to proactive, structured insight that exposes the people and networks behind physical supply chain threats.

Our investigative team at AKTEK iS works with your teams to identify behavioral patterns, track repeat actors, and understand the enabling conditions that allow theft, diversion, or fraud to persist across regions. Using external signals and contextual data from AKTEK iQ, we enrich investigations with location-based trends, incident correlation, and public risk signals. Everything is brought together inside AKTEK iO, our intelligence platform where patterns are visualized, actors are profiled, and asset protection strategies are built on evidence, not assumptions.

Whether you're facing repeat loss events, suspicious movement across distribution zones, or a rise in region-specific theft or diversion, AKTEK can help you turn fragmentation into focus and threat into action.

Find out more about how AKTEK can support your organization.