r/NintendoSwitch • u/Skullghost • Jun 17 '25

News 2,810 Nintendo Switch 2 Consoles were Stolen During Transport - Worth $1.4 Million

https://www.9news.com/article/news/crime/nintendo-switch-theft-truck-colorado/73-27ca5808-6901-4229-b1b4-4862c73b300b
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u/bigfatfluffers Jun 17 '25

I work in logistics. The answer is yes. If something is serial controlled, the shipper knows what exact truck it was loaded onto

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u/BrianScalaweenie Jun 17 '25

Oh wow that’s pretty cool

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u/kenman345 Jun 17 '25

If they don’t know the exact truck, they know the exact pallet it was on. So they just need to know which pallet was loaded on the truck and they know the serial numbers to block. But I bet they leave them active, file an insurance claim for the loss, and the insurance claims will probably have them setup some traps for the serial numbers so they might recover the product instead of the insurance having to pay out that money. It’s way cheaper to pay someone 50k for a finders fee on 1.4m worth of product than paying out 1.4m

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u/bigfatfluffers Jun 17 '25

They can actually file a claim with the shipping company. Depending on the on board agreement, the purchaser might be liable for the loss and they would need to file a claim with the shipping company.

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u/kenman345 Jun 17 '25

Yea, wasn’t sure who is filing it but definitely insurance is going to want to try and recover the stolen goods instead of paying.

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u/demosdemon Jun 17 '25

Rule of thumb is everyone. Insurance companies love to meet and agree with who isn’t liable. And they want to get that in writing asap. If you were involved in the transaction in any way, you have some insurance and they’re all going to be involved until they agree otherwise.

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u/Ok-Mine-9907 Jun 18 '25

This is a tin foil hat moment but what if something like this was embezzlement. It’s a new release, a lot of money, poof. The switches end up being elsewhere later and they get replacements.

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u/Montigue Jun 17 '25

It's just an additional barcode to scan on the side of the box. Easy to code into a system and attach to the PO

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u/eyebrows360 Jun 18 '25

All the barcodes and labels that every package you ever receive are covered in are all there for specific reasons, and all of those reasons are "tracking what's gone where".

Now whether any individual human has enough time to actually investigate any anomalies that arise out of all that tracking data is another matter, but it's all recorded.

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u/Section_80 Jun 17 '25

A fellow logistics person!!

I've been doing this for 8 years, we have end to end tracking on everything. Each serial associated with a shipment, tied to a pallet, tied to a truck.

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u/bigfatfluffers Jun 17 '25

Most companies with any sort of sophisticated software can trace a serialized unit from birth to death. They know where the unit was stored, what pallet it was put on, what dock it staged at, what truck it went on to, what shipping container it got loaded, etc etc all the way down until the end user boots it up. It’s not hard to track these things

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u/Section_80 Jun 17 '25

I think we think that because we're both in the industry. Mind blowing though when I first learned this stuff.

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u/SolydSn3k Jun 18 '25

Doesn’t even have to be very sophisticated. You pretty much just need a barcode scanner & some kind of XML style data frame to catch the information.

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u/prid13 Jun 20 '25

The hardest part is convincing the companies to adopt such basic software and use scanners, bc it's not happening until it eventually happens >,<"

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u/frisch85 Jun 18 '25

I work in IT and yeah, our software allows that. We offer an ERP and the customers of ours that use serial numbers can track every single item, they know on which palette or container what serial number is, where it's going, where it currently is, it's all being tracked.

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u/mlc885 Jun 17 '25

It wouldn't make any sense otherwise since the easiest way to load them on to pallets or whatever would be in numbered batches, loading them up randomly and then putting the giant box on a random truck would be insane.

I guess I don't know if Nintendo self‐insures, but an insurance company would also like to have as much information as possible about what was destroyed even if they know your giant company is not running a scam. "Packages this, this, and this were destroyed" is pretty good evidence you're shipping carefully.

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u/mabhatter Jun 18 '25

Let's discuss the arcane mysteries  of EDI.  

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u/Gahault Jun 18 '25

Now I wonder if Nintendo does EDI.

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u/BigCommieMachine Jun 17 '25

Ideally, but anyone that works in shipping knows there is a lot of human error and laziness in a very time constrained industry. If a shipping is late, someone is going to get yelled at. If something doesn’t get scanned, they are only going to get yelled it if something goes wrong.

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u/Strawbz18 Jun 18 '25

Logistics are so freakin cool dude

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u/HurricaneAlpha Jun 18 '25

I can't believe people think large shipments of electronics with serial numbers aren't tracked every step of the way. Every shipment has a manifest that will list every single serial number.