Less appealing then the millions of dollars in stolen copper costs everybody every year? Business who have increased their cost becasue of stolen copper. ' That doesn't sound very appealing to me. It's not punishment any more then having to maintain fire safety codes is a punishment. Just like pawnshops have to do with their merchandise.

I would make it a regulation to maintain who sells you copper. 'So you would punish the innocent with more paperwork and regulations along with the guilty?' You clearly have no clue about any aspect of this at all.

Shut down or heavily fine a few scrap yards for buying illegal scrap without keeping proper documentation, and the rest will require valid photo ID to sell to them and have video surveillance of the sale counter before the end of the day. Honestly, it would be trivially easy to link a thief with stolen scrap metal, provided the scrap dealer actually keeps fucking records like he's legally supposed to as is.Īnd I happen to work in an industry where I know exactly what type of paperwork the scrap dealer needs, and for how long he legally needs to keep it (note: it's a bit longer than a few days. Hell, multiple identically-angled cuts from the identical grade copper scrap and what's left in the house is probably a good start, never mind any DNA evidence the thief left at the scene (hair, blood if he cut himself, skin, etc). And given how much damage and work you'd need to do to rip tubing out of walls and floors, they can probably find some kind of evidence directly linking to the two. it's not exactly a convoluted path to draw a line between the two. Well, if a police get a report of a house that had a crapton of copper tubing ripped out of the walls and floors, and then discover a crapload of copper tubing just happened to be sold to a scrap dealer shortly thereafter.

I don't even know if that guy had to pay the junkyard owner back.īut, a simple driver's license number on the receipt got our nut back, and the machine in operation two days later, which was costing about $15,000 each day it was down. It was located, and the proprietor did indeed have the driver's license number of the person who sold it to him.Īt this point, the story gets really stupid: no charges were filed. Several people spread out, and hit every junk yard within 75 miles, inquiring about that special purpose brass nut. $1,800 dollars, just gone, and the machine was going to be down for as long as it took the supplier to get another new nut, and ship it to us. The thing was shiny-brand-new, waiting to be installed the next morning, when it mysteriously walked out of the plant. I don't know any other equipment that uses such a nut. Special purpose item, it's made specially for the tie-bars on our machines. We had a huge brass nut stolen from work. On the sales receipt that the junkyard keeps anyway, just record driver's license number and/or social security number of whoever sold the 'scrap' to you.

Don t whiz on the electric fence