This sounds like a scam run by the storage companies. Otherwise it is hard to understand what motivation "Tristan" had to drop the product off there instead of just, say, abandoning it on the side of the road. I can imagine a scammer getting upset that their load was a bunch of candy and not laptops or something else of high value, but why take it to a storage unit after accepting the load?
The actual scam here didn't play out, so NYTimes does not have the full story.
What happens is they truck the load to a yard and open it up. The contents of the trailer are then stolen and dumped into the gray market. If it has no value the load gets dumped into a storage facility and because the goods are accounted for law enforcement won't get involved.
The load was coming from Japan and probably insured for a lot of money, which ticked all the boxes that it would be electronics or household goods of some sort. They were probably shocked when it was just a brunch of weird flavors of candy they couldn't sell.
That doesn't quite scan either. Avoiding interest from law enforcement could be a motive for returning the goods, but the moment they actually steal a shipment they're on the hook again. I think the idea only works if the vast majority of the hijacked containers are returned -- but that is an absurd idea.
Sometimes if you can get someone on the hook you can keep extracting money from them. "You need to pay us for storage." "Oh sorry we forgot to mention, you need to pay the customs agent." "We need to cover our gas expenses."
So they may have actually dumped the goods but seeing if they could get any more out of the mark.
But Tristan never got paid anything, and came right out and told the person he was a scammer before telling him exactly where to find his freight and never tried to extract any money from the victim.
So either he's a scammer with a heart of gold and didn't want a bunch of chocolate to go to waste, or he's in on it somehow with the storage facilities.
He paid $2000 but doesn’t seem enough to make the scam worthwhile. Maybe the “happy path” is a multimillion cargo and a disinterest conglomerate that will just claim on insurance. Having a low value cargo and a very interested one man band is not worth the risk of getting caught.
