ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area Copper theft

Do you guys make any attempt to mark your spools of wire? I think I would have a metal stamp (to heat and burn into the spool) made up with some innocuous looking logo and some numbers that would be unique to your company so you could identify them if the cops found them in a junkyard or some other guy's truck.
It is sad that it comes to this but it may be the only way to slow down the theft.
Loose wire still has the "melt weight" value but I suspect most "scrap" dealers want to sell full spools to less than honorable trades. I have seen pallets of brand new spools of wire at our scrap yard. You know these are stolen.
This will only be stopped if the stolen copper loses some of it's street value.

We just shut down a huge WWII era manufacturing plant (Fansteel).

We heard an alarm going off one day. The PD took a look around and found nothing, but noticed stuff in dissarray, so they kept an eye on the place.

Turns out there was a gang of 8-10 thieves working the site, including 1 on the roof as a lookout. They would use the old material carts to haul stuff to the far end of the building (2-3 football fields), and then hand-jack it out to a van through a small hole in the 8' fence by the railroad track embankement.