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Comment by Enginerrrd | Hacker News Reader

Man, we don’t have tools to deal with these clowns. I had the gas tank in my truck drilled. I doubt they got even 5 gallons worth of gas, worth about $25 at the time. The fix cost me $2500. I found out from the shop that there had been a string of these going around town. After some digging, I came up with an order of magnitude estimate of somewhere around 50 such instances. So, what was undoubtedly just a couple of people at the most had done probably over $100k in damages to get maybe $1200 worth of spoils. Even if caught, unless they confessed to more, they’d probably only ever risk getting linked to a single one of these crimes and face a tiny fraction of the consequences they deserved. Such a drain on society.

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Maybe I'm missing context from your locality, but you think the meth heads tried to sell gasoline on the sidewalk, and not that the shadiest shop in town paid some people to drum up business?

I've met enough to know that selling sidewalk gas is totally an option in their mind.

You'd be amazed at how many fences are out there and what they will accept

Never attribute to malice… etc.

Hanlon's Razor doesn't apply to acts of clear malice.

Apparently the definition of clear is debatable here? It’s ridiculous to think a mechanic would pay people to damage gas tanks in the hopes of drumming up business.

There used to be a house opposite me in Chicago that was a big crack/meth dealer. They would accept literally anything as payment. People would turn up there all day long with storage totes filled with random crap. The crap would be picked through, narcotics exchanged and then the rest thrown out the back. It was an excellent source for storage totes, though I sometimes had to retrieve my trash can from there as they would steal half a dozen of them every week to put all their leftover crap into.

Good to see your comment as always.

I can confirm this exact workflow - in a much safer city, from a much safer distance.

You in a decent spot now?

In the middle of nowhere! Pretty quiet now. Miss the craziness from time-to-time :) Hope everything is good with you.

the same thing happens in my area where there's a lot of car/RV homeless. If you take a look and think about it, you'll come to the conclusion that they're definitely not driving a decrepit 1980s winnebago to a gas station and paying $5/gal for gas to run their heat and generators.

No way. Was this is Canada? Specifically in the upper interior of BC, during ski season? Either we know each other, or drilling holes in gasoline tanks is way more widespread. I have never heard of another instance of this happening, ever.

> Man, we don’t have tools to deal with these clowns.

We do. Arrest and imprison the fences and scrappers that pay cash to buy copper off the tweakers.

The problem will solve itself in a few weeks. Hang the fences, and the thieves will starve. It's both way easier to go after them, and they have something to lose if they don't follow the law.

> Arrest and imprison the fences and scrappers that pay cash to buy copper off the tweakers.

How do you expect the scrappers to know if something was stolen and not just some old wires you've been stuffing in a bin until you accumulate enough to justify a trip to the scrap yard?

How do you even expect to catch the scrappers who knowingly pay for stolen copper if you don't have a way to know that what they throw into the smelter was stolen?

Meanwhile if the idiots keep stealing copper from the same place over and over, is it really that hard to maybe put up some cameras or set up a sting?

If it's a scrapper willing to buy sketchy sourced copper, they'll be the type that pays the least for it.

Is that actually helpful or does it just cause the addicts to commit twice as many thefts?

Perhaps we should pay them more instead?

Probably more efficient to lower the cost of the drugs.

You may have missed my sarcasm.

There is a very strong link with higher prices for copper with more wire theft, as anyone would expect. You pay more for it you get more of it.

There is a strong link between lower fentanyl prices leading to increased usage and overdosing. Areas with cheaper fentanyl experience more crime not less, any decrease in individual criminality is more than offset by an increase in the percentage of users. You know we live in a world where this data is already available.

They don't need to know if something was stolen. All they need to do is require an ID, not pay in cash, and pay 30 days after receiving the merchandise.

At which point people with legitimate copper to sell start going somewhere else because the repeat players resent having 30 days worth of interest stolen from them every month and the one-time sellers don't trust an IOU from a company they've never done business with before.

Meanwhile you just create a new line of business for fences who are willing to pay cash today in exchange for a margin and then take the IOU from the legitimate scrapper and turn a profit in 30 days. Or the drug dealers take the copper as payment and then don't care about the 30 days if it means they can sell more drugs.

You can't make a commodity not worth money. At some point you have to actually catch the thieves.

> At which point people with legitimate copper to sell start going somewhere else

Make it required by law, and they won't be able to go somewhere else. Legitimate businesses with scrap to sell aren't going to risk committing a felony to get paid below market value 30 days sooner (Not to mention that many businesses are used to getting paid on a delay, and selling scrap for pennies is a tiny portion of their revenue flow).

Catalytic converter thefts have been decimated by similar policies. As it turns out, there are plenty of hoops that you can introduce that aren't a serious impediment to b2b transactions (which make up the overwhelming, massive majority of legitimate trade in this space), but are a serious impediment to tweakers selling stolen property.

> Or the drug dealers take the copper as payment and then don't care about the 30 days if it means they can sell more drugs

Street dealers are trying to run a drug business, not a goddamn copper clearinghouse. If they wanted to run one, they wouldn't be out on the street slinging meth.

The engine block in an old car blew up so I ripped it completely apart and sold the parts online and in person to various people. I tried to sell my own catalytic converter to a shop I found online that was some kind of on-the-up-and-up licensed buyer.

What I didn’t know is they wouldn’t buy it from me if I wasn’t a licensed seller. I was irritated but realized it probably was for the best. And it worked, I still have it sitting in my shed.

I don’t know how to make that reality happen with copper, which is clearly much more abundant than cat converters are, but I imagine you could at least do something like what happens when you buy a pseudoephedrine product, they scan your ID and track the frequency of your purchases. Too much too quick and you’re on a short list.

I don’t see a feasiae way to invert that, selling copper requires an ID and infrastructure for maintaining a database of sellers, amount, and frequency, but I imagine if you started at the top and worked your way down it could become a regulated commodity to sell… somehow.

Some states (Alabama, for instance, as I'm told by a contractor business operator friend who lives in it), requires you to either have a receipt from a licensed contractor who replaced whatever you're scrapping, or a business license to sell scrap copper.

I'm not wedded to any particular solution that will stop tweakers from getting cash from scrap yards no questions asked. Any mixture of them will work.

FWIW, I've asked him if the state mandating a 30 day delay on payments, or banning cash transactions for it would affect him any. His answer was 'not at all'.

requiring some kind of license doesn't really fix the problem of theft at all. it just adds layers of middlemen to collect up the copper from the layer below and further legitimize it. so it does reduce the street price for stolen copper, but since copper and stolen bikes (which also have almost no value now) are one of the few income sources available, it could conceivably increase the volume of stolen copper.

The middleman need to be doing incredible volume for it to be worth the margin and the risk, and finding and shutting them down is very easy, because:

- They are trivial to find, because they need a large, physical, business presence. This sort of trade doesn't happen under a highway overpass, or in an alley off 3rd.

- There are paper trails that point to them from any legitimate businesses upstream of them.

- Anyone lower in the criminal chain will happily flip on them.

Is argument over this an example of learned helplessness, a desire for society to do nothing and declare failure, or just arguing for the sake of contrarianism?

We have evidence of trying it with catalytic converters, and it worked. Catching every thief is hard. Catching one thief, and having them point to their fence is easy.

no, its not really learned helplessness, and I don't know the industry that well, but I move a certain amount of scrap and there's methheads all over the neighborhood where I work. once they started being more careful at the scrapyard the tweakers started selling their copper to a guy I call 'mr froggy'. he's around a lot of the time, and he's a larger scale copper thief. I don't know who mr froggy sells to.

> And it worked, I still have it sitting in my shed.

Isn't that exactly the problem? That's your property, which you now can't sell. So it's sitting in your shed. Most people in that situation are ultimately going to chuck it in the trash, which means not only that you've been harmed, but that those rare elements aren't getting properly recycled.

> you could at least do something like what happens when you buy a pseudoephedrine product

The thing that causes grief at scale for anyone with a cold but has produced zero reduction in the availability of street drugs?

Very, very few people who aren’t a licenced scrapyard, auto repair shop, junkyard, etc need to scrap catalytic converters.

In my state, if you do, you can present your car title for the vehicle it came from to an auto dealer who can take it off your hands.

99,999% of people won't pull their car apart to sell the parts individually. We just take the whole car to the scrap yard.

So even though the ~17 people who take the time to do this are slightly inconvenienced by not being able to sell that one part, I'd say it's easily worth it given the millions of people who are not having their catalytic converters stolen any more.

> Make it required by law, and they won't be able to go somewhere else.

So then you inconvenience the legitimate businesses but not the ones who don't follow the law.

> Catalytic converter thefts have been decimated by similar policies.

Correlation is not causation. When you get a lot of a particular problem, people try 50 different things at once to try to make it happen less, and then it happens less. Sometimes because one of them works (but not necessarily your thing) and even more often because of reversion to the mean.

This is how we get the accumulation of bad laws. People pass something ineffective but at the same time as an unrelated reduction in the problem, and now if you want to get rid of it you have people pointing to the chance correlation.

> Street dealers are trying to run a drug business, not a goddamn copper clearinghouse.

They're empirically willing to operate a car wash or similar to launder their money, why not a scrap yard?

And they don't even have to own the business, just be willing to wait the 30 days.

Street dealers aren't laundering their money through running an Albuquerque car wash.

In CA we had a clothes dryer motor replaced. As a result we were left with the old part.

I took it to a nearby recycling center, and they wanted my drivers license to pay me the $0.58 it was worth. I declined and just let them reap their windfall. I imagine I would have got the 58c in cash, that’s how it works with plastic bottles.

California’s tried cracking down on catalytic converter theft with significant measures. (I think a legitimate scrapyard would have to do a bunch of paperwork to buy a cat.) Anyone know the outcomes?

There was a nationwide catalytic converter theft ring for the first few years of the pandemic. Junkies around the country would steal cats and ship them off to New Jersey. The ringleader pleaded guilty last year: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/leader-national-catalytic-con...

I believe this was a significant portion of the brazen daylight catalytic converter thefts in California in the early years of the pandemic.

Seems trivial to just AirTag a few car parts and follow the thieves to their warehouse, doesn't it?

How do you guarantee the tagged parts are the ones to get stolen? Tangentially, there was a theft ring caught like this but IIRC it was power tools.

My state used a few undercover cops to start fencing (not actually) stolen cats to scrapyards, identified scrapyards that would knowingly take stolen property, and then turned a few of the employees / owners of such places into CIs. Eventually a large nationwide ring was found.

This kind of thing is why Dirty Harry style crime-punishment-porn exists.

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