Experienced Scrapper
I know that there's a trend in areas that are more severely affected by the economy, of people pulling out wiring and selling it as scrap metal. In Riverside, CA (where I used to live) there were several instances of people meeting a gruesome death-by-shock for doing that. I'm just curious--is that actually lucrative? Moreso than collecting scrap metal by legal means? I'm not interested in doing it at all, I'm just wondering why people would risk their lives.
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The quick answer is it's illegal to take wire that is attached to any existing structure. And just plain dumb...
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Way to not answer the question at all.
Originally Posted by dherik
Experienced Scrapper
Short answer: Yes, it is a very easy, albeit illegal, way to make money; but people are easily caught, because if you are stupid enough to try to steal that stuff you're probably not smart enough to get away with it.
Long answer:
An anecdote I heard a while back... A farmer had waited for years to get 4 miles worth of copper cable run all the way out to his house. About 4 months after that, in the middle of the night, a few guys in a van ripped down 1 or 2 miles of the copper wire. The value of the wire is 10x or 15x the value of the scrap, and the cops had a watch out for the men hitting up any scrap yard within 300 miles. Instead of selling the wire as scrap, however, they sold it as used copper wire lines, and made 5x the scrap value. Well, that is, they would have, if they hadn't been caught on the other side of the state trying to sell it to the electric company they had stole it from.
I can't stand it when people steal metal; I hate it. I hate it very much. It is parasitic, and destroys such valuable enterprises. If you steal metal, you rarely are stealing something that is going to get recycled already, but something like new copper pipes, or brand new aluminum ladders; you are taking something that is worth hundreds of dollars, and reducing it to a quick $10, $20 or $50, or in the case I described, hundreds of thousands of dollars, down to thousands of dollars.
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What a couple of dummies!! I always say that if they'd put as much effort into a job or work, they'd be rich. But crooks aren't known for their intelligence.
People may laugh at me, but that's ok. I laugh all the way to the bank.
Experienced Scrapper
Definitely lucrative, definitely illegal, definitely dangerous.
At our church, about a year or so ago we got a pretty darn nice security system. Bells, whistles, sensors, alarms, electronic door locks, magnetic card key things (like for a hotel room), and CAMERAS. Well, it was merely DAYS after installation of this system that the secretary was sitting at her desk and happened to glance up at the 30" monitor that has all the different views of all the cameras. Well, in the east parking lot, there was a guy standing on the church's dumpster reaching up toward the electric lines running to one of our outbuildings. Called the cops and they caught him in the act of stealing our copper wire. HAHA!
They showed the cops our new security system, which they were very impressed by, and gave them a copy of the recording from the camera that caught the guy. That's pretty hard evidence if you ask me, especially considering that the cameras are 720p high-definition quality.
Anyhow, if you come across some copper wire that you can get in a legal, safe manner. Get it and scrap it 'cause it's worth some good money!
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