Cargo cans) aren't especially well-tracked, but they do have tags, embedded in their hullmetal, with theoretically-write-only caches. There's not a huge amount of incentive to write fake info to it (you could simply not write anything at all) so what's there is usually acccurate, if incomplete. If someone says they hauled something food-unsafe in that can, you assume they did. If someone says they hauled the can somewhere (and you can confirm that they signed it with their private key), they probably did.

This mostly comes up when there are ownership disputes. You generally tag your can when you receive it and when you are done with it, and the next person should reject it if the tag chain doesn't end with a "released by." But it's not uncommon for there to be an unclosed ownership or three in a can's history, and that's not necessarily abnormal: like milk crates, cans go a-wandering, and as long as you don't try to sell a can back to a past owner they won't come after you. Large shipping companies will simply knock off the can deposits on their own returning cans from their payment when accepting a shipment. Between large shippers that tends to equalize out, though a small single- or double-can tramp freighter may find itself eating an unexpected cost.