It occurred to me though that it could also be a “double-dipping” scam. The fake shipping company supposedly “loses” the merchandise, an insurance claim is filed, then the Kit Kats are quietly retrieved and resold. In that case, even if the insurance company refuses to pay out (as they did) it's not a total loss, as they're only out a few grand in storage fees. It'd be fairly low risk as well, as there wouldn't be any tangible evidence of fraud, and in the worst case it wouldn't be hard to recover the Kit Kats and pretend they were miraculously found.

It still seems sort of unlikely to me that Bokksu was attempting to commit insurance fraud, but it's hard to deny that the facts seem oddly to fit. Why would the scammer take the truckload to a cold storage facility, rather than, say, just abandoning the containers somewhere? Why would he admit to being a scammer, if not in order to provide a basis for an insurance claim? What possible benefit was there to the scammer, when he didn't even get any money for his role in the scheme (at least, not from the trucking broker)? And why would Bokksu not disclose until well after the fact that they owned the company that was responsible for releasing the containers to the trucking company?

For a company valued at $100M, $110K does seem like a trifling amount of money to commit fraud over, but stranger things have certainly happened.

It doesn't make sense that the original owner would allow this to go so far as 50% of the load being lost in storage bureaucracy and the mess published by a journalist. The scammer was skimming pennies and generating much bigger losses to everyone else.

One factor could also be the scammer getting bad conscience when realizing they weren't just skimming off a corp but screwing over a small-timer. Maybe they were drunk or high at the time of the call.

Seems like there was more than one independently scheming entity in some way, and at least one scheme didn't pan out as planned. The Big Lebowski reference doesn't seem too far-fetched...