Recently, in New Jersey, people have been stealing catalytic converters from cars. Why are people stealing this specific part all of a sudden?
It happened to 4 people on my parents' street. I am wondering why this is the new thing and why they are specifically targeting Toyotas and Hondas.
They contain precious metals that the thieves recycle for scrap money. Mostly rhodium, palladium and platinum.
The ones they target tend to be the models with higher amounts of metals (for cleaner emissions) in the catalytic converters.
National data is scarce, but news reports point to thousands of catalytic converter thefts over the past year, a crime wave that has risen with the price of rhodium, a silvery-white chemical element that is a byproduct of the production of platinum and palladium, and is unparalleled in its ability to remove the most toxic pollutants from vehicle exhaust. [...] Before the 2008 recession hit, South African mines were churning out platinum, a pillar of the country’s export economy that is used in a wide variety of products from jewelry to heavy industry. They kept doing so during the downturn, creating a massive surplus of platinum that persists to this day. Because rhodium is a byproduct of platinum production, it is produced only when mining companies see a profit in platinum — which they might not for another few years until the surplus wanes.
Source: Lesley Wroughton & Max Bearak, A precious metal that costs 15 times the price of gold is driving a surge in thefts of catalytic converters, The Washington Post, March 4, 2021.
The precious metals describe why they are valuable, but not why they are stolen.
Consider something else that's easy to steal: bikes. You only need a battery powered angle grinder to steal a bike (and in many cases, the bike isn't locked to a solid object so it can be carried away and the angle grinder operated later; it's also possible to disable a lock with a battery powered hot glue gun, allowing using the angle grinder at a time of a day when nobody is hearing it, since the owner can't unlock the bike and has no choice than to leave it there). Many bikes are even more valuable than catalytic converters.
What's different between bikes and catalytic converters is that if a thief has 100 bikes with no proof of ownership and tries to sell them to a used bike dealer, that dealer probably wouldn't accept the bikes.
However, if a thief has 100 catalytic converters with no proof of owning 100 cars or operating a car repair shop (to explain having 100 cats), and tries to sell them to a scrap metal dealer, in many cases the dealer will accept those cats.
Of course, there are other channels too for bike sales than selling them to a used bike dealer. The thief could sell them directly to customers, advertising the stolen bikes online. That's why we still have bike theft, some people buy cheap used bikes with no proof of ownership, directly from the thief.
What we need to prevent catalytic converter theft is better accounting for used cats. A scrap metal dealer should only accept cats with proof of ownership or proof of operating a car repair business. Used catalytic converters have value only for scrap metal dealers, not for anyone else.
You can also reduce the risk of your cat being stolen. If you engave your registration number into the cat, in a manner so visible that someone considering stealing the cat would see it, the chances of that cat being stolen are reduced.
