For this example, a scanner does nothing. All it will do is tell you that there was a truck there. But in this case the existence of vehicles on the train were

For this example, a scanner does nothing. All it will do is tell you that there was a truck there. But in this case the existence of vehicles on the train were not in question - it was about the ownership of them. It should be much harder to fake shipping manifests and every VIN should be manually verified and against a database of stolen.