COLOMBIA – In early November, Gabe Foust watched with fury and despair the images from surveillance cameras at his summerville auto repair shop, which showed several people cutting catalytic converters from customers’ vehicles.
The thieves would flee with 17 of them, a charge of $ 35,000 to install on cars that would likely only yield a few hundred dollars each as scrap.
“They stayed there for two hours, just turning off the car’s converters. The last six months have been an Old West show, ”said Foust, owner of A + Auto Service. “I mean, just crazy.”
The incident highlights a rapidly growing problem across South Carolina, as valuable emission control devices are being stolen at rates of astonishment from metropolitan areas to sleepy rural cities. Recent arrests have been made in the populous Lake Murray corridor in Lexington County and in tiny Saint George, home of the Dorchester County government.
Catalytic converters are valued for the metals used to make them, including palladium, palladium and rhodium – all lighter and more effective at removing toxic chemicals from a vehicle’s exhaust system.
“They can be sold to scrappers from $ 20 to $ 240. At the highest price point for precious metals, a catalytic converter that came from a diesel vehicle may have yielded a black market price of around $ 640 ”Said the National Insurance Crime Bureau.
Designed to detoxify gases and pollutants from exhaust systems, the converters are located close to engine blocks or exhaust manifolds, as they require temperatures of 800 degrees to function properly.
Police agencies in the state of Palmetto have been dealing with the problem in recent months.
On January 19, a traffic stop near Lake Murray in Lexington County led to the arrest of three people who had saw blades and nearly a dozen catalytic converters. Between July and December of last year, Lexington County sheriff’s deputies responded to 144 of these thefts, almost triple in the same period in 2019.
In early December, the Orangeburg County Sheriff’s Office reported a series of thefts of 25 vehicle devices parked at dealerships, according to a December 4 Times and Democrat article.
Greenville County authorities released surveillance photos on January 2 of two people wanted in connection with a series of vehicle thefts on a Landrum property.
Two dozen vehicles from Dorchester County have taken vehicles since August 1.
And just this week, police in St. George, a city of 2,000, arrested two people who had eight catalysts in their possession.
“Many businesses have been disrupted and their vehicles have been tampered with, which has caused many problems for our business owners in St. George,” said Chief Brett Camp.
The converters, which can cost more than $ 2,000 to replace, can be sawn in minutes, usually taken from vehicles in public spaces or large batches under cover of darkness, because of the noise produced by the cutting tools.
While not a new crime – the National Insurance Crime Bureau reports that 23,394 catalytic converters were stolen from coast to coast between 2008 and 2015 – it is a crime that decreases and decreases. But thefts appear to be at their peak, officials said.
After the increase in thefts in Lexington County, the sheriff’s office recently launched an educational campaign, alerting people to the problem and offering ways to protect their vehicles, such as parking in well-lit areas, recording a vehicle identification number on the converter or replace existing ones with models that need to be screwed to the vehicles.
“It’s so random that there’s really nothing we can point to in terms of a specific part of the county or a specific day, so we’re still trying to work out if we can find any kind of data points that indicate a pattern,” Captain Adam Myrick , a spokesman for the Lexington sheriff’s department said.
With a week to go until the end of the month, the Columbia Police Department has responded to eight reports of catalyst thefts since the first day of the year. It is a number high enough to concern city and district authorities.
“We have seen a series of car catalyst thefts that have been disabled along the highway, especially interstate,” said Stan Smith, head of the criminal investigations division at Richland County Sheriff’s Department. “I would suggest that a deactivated car be towed as quickly as possible to prevent it from becoming a target.”
A 2011 bill enforced restrictions on the sale of scrap catalytic converters, allowing only licensed retailers or wholesalers to sell them and requiring metal recyclers to keep detailed records, including a copy of the seller’s name and address along with a photograph or fingerprint.
Since the law was adopted, authorities say thieves get money for their converters by surrounding them through independent licensed buyers who pay cents on the dollar and sell them in bulk to metal recyclers at a profit.
But hundreds of scrap deposits around South Carolina have implemented strict procurement policies to ensure that stolen parts are not part of their inventory, an industry spokesman said.
“The groups associated with us would not buy these catalytic converters, for obvious reasons,” said Jimbo Pratt, executive director of the South Carolina Recyclers and Dismantlers Association. “We guarantee that this is not a problem. We check all incoming vehicles. “
Once removed from the car, it won’t be long before drivers discover the missing part.
“You will know when to turn up the volume. It will sound like a NASCAR race car, “said Myrick.” It will be very noisy. It won’t work as well as it normally does. “