Claw and Order

November 15, 2023 9:33 AM

So Thieves Nabbed Your Catalytic Converter. Here’s Where It Ended Up. The NYTimes takes a look at the underground platinum group metals market, from thieves who steal catalytic converters or "cats", to refiners that buy up stolen cats and retrieve the rare metals, to the banks that financially underwrite the illicit trade.
posted by They sucked his brains out! (8 comments total)

The thieves have cast a wide net. A Bimbo Bakery delivery truck was hit in New Castle, Del., as were a Mr. Ding-A-Ling Ice Cream truck in Latham, N.Y., and 36 school buses over a single weekend in one Connecticut community.

They left out the highest-profile theft of them all!
posted by TedW at 10:11 AM on November 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm not jealous of many men's hair, but god-damn Sir Martyn Poliakoff.
posted by alex_skazat at 10:13 AM on November 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

Relatedly, this August post from chavenet, an excellent long read: How Tulsa cops brought down a $500 million catalytic converter crime ring.
posted by kristi at 10:54 AM on November 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

Neat to see the Stillwater mine mentioned. As part of my wife’s graduate work in Geology, I got to go down into an active stope of the Stillwater platinum/palladium mine with the mine geologists. Miners were in the stope, and the geologist spray painted an area where we could sample ore from. One of the miners jokingly (at least I think he was joking) said “high-graders, John!”

When we went into the mine, I saw a sign that said “X days without a lost time injury.” When we came out, the same sign had been re-set to 0 days.

Everywhere in the mine there were various DANGER signs (explosives, vehicles, various hazards). There’s a bar in Nye, Montana (and not much else besides that) and the sign on the door says DANGER: if you ain’t a miner, you ain’t shit.
posted by jimfl at 11:14 AM on November 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

So I guess homeless sweeps isn’t going to help with this?
posted by Artw at 11:20 AM on November 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

The Chicago Sun-Times also ran a good investigative piece on this recently. Inside Chicago's Catalytic Converter Theft Epidemic.

They've hit my block a few times in the last year or so. Our car is parked in our garage so it's safe but lots of our neighbors park on the street. There was one night a few months ago when we woke up to the sound of them cutting one out around 4am, only for them to come back and hit another one at 5:30am right as I was taking my dogs out for a walk. A colleague just got hers stolen last week from the parking lot where she gets on the commuter train to come to work downtown. Having witnessed it, it's amazing how fast they are. Less than a minute, easy. And per the Sun-Times article they are often armed so I'm sorry to my neighbors but I am not confronting them. By the time the cops get there 5, 10 minutes later the crew is long gone, probably taking off in a stolen car or at least one with no plates.
posted by misskaz at 12:38 PM on November 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

If you just want the platinum without having to steal car parts, you can find a surprisingly high amounts of it in random roadside dust from the tiny amounts of platinum used up in the catalytic conversion process.
posted by Copronymus at 1:18 PM on November 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

If you just want the platinum without having to steal car parts, you can find a surprisingly high amounts of it in random roadside dust from the tiny amounts of platinum used up in the catalytic conversion process.

Interesting video. That's a very high yield for roadside dust. Are we really just entropy machines redistributing the world's platinum along its roadsides? That's wild, if true.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 6:16 PM on November 16, 2023