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Some Londoners Cut Off As Failed Copper Thieves Take Fiber
judgecorp writes "About 37,000 Sky broadband and phone customers lost their connection, as incompetent copper thieves raided BT's infrastructure... and took fibre. Some scrap metal dealers will pay £4 per kg for stolen copper cables, but there is no dark market for fibre, so the thieves didn't make anything — which might be some small consolation to customers, some of whom had to wait for two days for BT to repair the inaccessible cables."
or Crispy Kritters as the constables call them
Declare the copper thieves terrorists and have them shot.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
As someone who has spliced fiber: It's such a PITA, no wonder no one's buying it. I almost feel sorry for the NSA goons who had to splice all that fiber optic cable to create PRISM. A couple of days to restore operation is awesome. Kudos to Sky broadband workers who repaired the cluster fsck.
I have never heard of a "dark market" before. Is this a more "PC" way of saying "Black Market"? I know I recently heard people asserting that "Black Friday" is racist, so is "Black Market" also racist?
I sold 30 Kg for $50/US ... this afternoon
We have had thieves ruin 80 thousand dollars worth of HVAC equipment to steal a few hundred bucks of scrap copper and aluminum coil. In some ways, "cleaning" the material so it can be sold for top tier scrap is more work than a regular job.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Nice link, but next time a NSFW warning would be appreciated - not for the pictures of the burnt thieves, that's no biggie, but for the rather risque site logo and ads :/
Thanks :)
William George
It could have gone much. much worse for them: Not for the squeamish.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Aw, Goddamn it!
I had a giant spool of fiber cable in my garage (about 1/2" thick cable, 12 strand burial 62.5 multimode) - 62.5 is pretty obsolete. Guys come around garbage night picking up scrap metal from homes on the street.... I tried leaving the giant spool of fiber out before and they knew it was fiber so they didn't take it. I waited a few months, I wrap a little bit of 24 pair cat 3 telephone cable on the very outer layer, BAM! entire 180lbs fiber spool gone by the metal guys! They got a few feet of copper, and a whole bunch of useless fiber, I was so happy! Remember, spool was heavy, took up too much space, I don't feel like having Kijiji/Craigslist people come to my home - I just wanted it gone. Cat 3 24pair?... no tears shed over that either.
Naturally, if fiber were valuable for a dark market it would no longer be dark.
We've had the same problem in Southern Ontario before, where 80k people lost internet access for nearly a day on Rogers, back in the early 2000's. A lot of companies now put "fibre" on their above ground lines to stop them from cutting it, it works, kinda.
Om, nomnomnom...
That happens a lot on the Pakenham line in Melbourne Australia.
Idiots take either wire or fiber..
Either way its delayed trains or busses..
Modded you up because: MY EYES!!!
According to the Guardian, the hapless criminals were after valuable copper cable, but all they managed to find was fibre, which enables faster broadband speeds but is almost impossible to resell.
How do they know that they were copper thieves? How do they know that the thieves weren't actually trying to steal fiber cables? This is like someone stealing a car, and then everyone laughing at them and calling them failed mobile-home thieves. The whole article is one assumption (at least it appears that way because it never provides reasoning) and keeps pointing to how dumb the thieves were.
Queue the NSA theorists...
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Doesn't most fiber cables have a bunch of copper surrounding the cable?
Happened in San Diego too: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/26.80.html#subj5.1
Oracle and unix guy.
I work at a cable manufacturing plant. We draw the various needed gauges of copper wires on our own from thick gauge copper spools. We pay about £4 per kg for the raw and refined material, so I find it hard to believe that it sells for the same price on the black market, unrefined and partially isolated.
Some of my neighborhood thieves have moved to London.
Sounds like whoever stole the broken 20 year-old cassette deck out of the 40 year-old car sitting open in the driveway on flat tires. Must be a gold mine for sure! They even left all the knobs and bolts in the tray in the console with the wrench. Biggest WTF ever.
I work at a cable manufacturing plant and we draw our required gauges of wires from thick gauge copper spools. We pay about 6-7€/kg for the stuff, so I really doubt that stripped wires, which are dirty unrefined copper (residues), go for 5€/kg on the dark market. That's just insane. Our recycler doesn't even pay that for clean copper scrap.
We had this happen in Hawaii about a year ago. Copper thieves have darkened stretches of roadway and shut down communicatios as a result of their efforts.
On the bright side, we had two cases where copper thieves cut into live wires. Unfortunately both lived to tell about it but you won't want to see what they look like now. One of the incidents occurred near my office. Lights flickered and went out. Later, on the evening news there was an eyewitness telling a reporter about it. He said the thief ran screaming down the street with the flesh on his arms hanging off like rags.
Unfortunately that hasn't deterred copper theft in the least.
You mean you'll put down your rock, and I'll put down my sword and we'll try and kill each other like civilized peo
However, usually the copper thieves are smart and use insulated tools to cut the wires. While embedding power line within fiber cable would cook an unprepared fiber thief (who did not expect the fiber cable to have high voltage), it would not do anything for the copper thief (who already though this was a power cable), actually, it would be worse - now the thief would at least get a consolation prize - the embedded power wire.
Dan Forden is missing from the corner of that picture shouting "Toasty" or "Crispy"
it would not do anything for the copper thief (who already though this was a power cable), actually, it would be worse - now the thief would at least get a consolation prize - the embedded power wire.
Yeah... instead they should use steel-clad or kevlar-clad armored cabling; with cut-resistance: inside pressurized conduit, that will set off alarms, and sound like they hit a gas line, if depressurized.
So don't use copper. Use aluminium. Steel cored aluminium cable is better suited to power lines.
You already do at Aldi markets.
Copper theft is incredibly destructive for the return. For a couple of dollars worth of copper, they won't think twice about ruining a $10,000 air conditioner. Plus considering the amount of time it takes to steal the copper, they could have gotten a minimum wage job and made more money, and not have to go to jail or die at the end of the day. It just pisses me off how stupid these a-holes are and how much damage they cause to society as a whole.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Do "legitimate" businesses like piping companies or wire companies buy copper wholesale from scrapyards which are clearly dealing in stolen copper? I'm just confused as to how there is a market for stolen copper. I understand that it is easier to rip it out of an air conditioning unit than it is to dig it out of the ground, but I'd think it would be easy to reduce demand for stolen copper and kill the market for it by penalizing companies who accept stolen goods, same as any other goods. I'd expect that the companies who are buying copper wouldn't be buying in such small quantities that it would be hard to identify where it was coming from.
From what I've heard, there's a ton of competition for minimum-wage jobs these days -- somebody that already has a criminal record, addiction, etc. wouldn't stand a chance at getting and keeping a job these days. I'm guessing that rather than being flagrant assholes, they're fairly desperate to get cash but don't want to rob/mug anyone in person or deprive others struggling to get by, and (as is common among people *that*poor) have no sympathy for somebody that can afford a $10k air conditioner.
I remember when a Wally World opened up near me a year ago. There were more than 20-40 applicants for every single position.
Add the urgency of meth addiction to the mix, and it is no wonder why there are so many copper thieves -- it is easy to do, hard to get caught, provides tax free money instantly, and is not a violent crime.
Part of it is how sad thieves are, part of it is how shitty the economy is which hasn't improved much since '08.
Wal-Mart contributes to Think Progress (left wing propaganda group), not the Republicans.
That said, you REALLY think Wal-Mart wanted people offline on Black Friday? They have a website too you know... And the average Wal-Mart customer (just to unfairly typecast) is way more likely to desire not having to travel any distance.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There's plenty of violence if you touch the primary.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Citation on the 'draconian new laws' affecting home prices? Your two links don't mention any new laws, the thief's family was rather thoroughly smacked down by the court. Indeed, the closest thing to a dissenting judge was one that agreed with it, but had a 'you were thinking too hard' comment that because the dude was committing a felony(the damage to the transformer raised it to that point), any injuries were on HIS head. The others were saying that a reasonable person wouldn't have broken into the room, lifted a near 100 pound cover, drained a transformer, etc...
I don't read AC A human right
On the land lines - often they'll have a metal thread so that they can be detected by metal detectors in an attempt to make them easier to locate and prevent cuts. It'd be a steel wire though, not very valuable.
I don't read AC A human right
If You try to splice into a fiber line, it will cut off the service, causing the operator of the line to know someone has cut their line and spliced it.
The reason You vandalize (inaccessible) fiber is to give Yourself time to splice into it.
Someone did it to the fiber that carried the NYSE quotes a few decades back.
Now, someone has done it to this line in the UK.
Start by installing encryption equipment while You use that repaired bit temporarily. In the long run, abandon that line totally, and run an entirely new line.
Well, accepting a huge damage to somebody else for a moderate personal gain is the very core definition of evil. Copper thieves, investment bankers, cult leaders and politicians all qualify.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
huge damage to somebody else for a moderate personal gain
Except that even compared to just their own damage/"investment" they don't come out ahead. Read grand-parent post:
Plus considering the amount of time it takes to steal the copper, they could have gotten a minimum wage job and made more money
So you really have to wonder, what exactly is driving those idiots...
Or we could, you know, just switch all our telecoms to fibre, so there will never be a theft of it again.
Copper is not obsolete anymore.
Indeed. I think it must be some advanced delusions grandeur, along the lines of them figuring themselves elite high-tech thieves that will make it big. They probably have not even bothered to find out what little money they would have gotten had they been successful.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The previous occupants of my house removed all the copper water pipes from the walls and ceiling when they moved (plus pretty much anything else that wasn't bolted down or too heavy to move). They would have gotten $50 maximum from the pipes (more likely around $20) and they caused thousands of dollars worth of water damage (they didn't turn the water off at the street when they did it, a WTF in its self).
What needs to be done is to increase the penalty for receiving goods like this to make the recyclers a lot more hesitant about receiving this kind of material...
Sky Customers Cut Off As Failed Copper Thieves Steal BT Fibre
What's fib-ree?
1: tying a rope around the cable, attached to a quad bike.
2: 2 blokes stand at end end of the cable with sharpened spades. They stand on rubber mats.
3: At a signal (walkie talkies or mobile phone), they simultaneously chop through the cable bundle.
4: Someone on the quadbike revs up and rips the cable out of the duct.
The thieves then roll the cable up at their leisure, usually having about 25-30 minutes to finish the deed before the police show up.
It's standard practice to use vans painted up to look like genuine phone company items and for the theives themselves to dress as phone company workers
The phone company (BT OpenEeach) and UK police have implemented procedures to get faster response to cable breaks and for police to attend the area automatically - that is why the thieves have 25-30 minutes instead of the 2-4 hours they previously had. As a result several prolific gangs have been caught, but only 1 in 50 cable thefts results in anyone being apprehended.
SImilar tactics are also used to steal copper from the railway system - and that's despite cables carrying a few hundred volts.
Only the really desperate (and foolish) ones try to steal from HV switchyards. The tactic there is to throw heavy chains over incoming 250kV lines to short them out, but because power distribution systems use rebreakers, those chains generally only last a couple of minutes before they melt.
Penalties for being in a cable theft gang are esentially a slap on the wrist compared to the profits which can be made and even with recent tightening of laws, the penalties for handling stolen comms cables are laughable.
Given that railway cable thefts can (and often do) result in upwards of a half a million people being stranded (often in trains, stalled on lines), there's some traction on calls to make a specific class of offence such as "interference with transport network/endangering transport" (which also includes lasing aircraft) with non--parole terms of at least 10 years.
Bah, I'd take fiber over copper for Internet connections. But then who would provide Internet for me?
Hello Verizon FIOS that took over GTE? I am sick of your crappy phone systems on copper. Terrible connections with dial-up (lots of line noises and never go to faster than 26400-31200 speeds even on 56k modems), no DSL due to distances over 20K ft. from COs, etc. Frak your expensive limited wireless services. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
From what I've heard, there's a ton of competition for minimum-wage jobs these days -- somebody that already has a criminal record, addiction, etc. wouldn't stand a chance at getting and keeping a job these days. I'm guessing that rather than being flagrant assholes, they're fairly desperate to get cash but don't want to rob/mug anyone in person or deprive others struggling to get by, and (as is common among people *that*poor) have no sympathy for somebody that can afford a $10k air conditioner.
That is just the thing. The homeowner probably CAN'T afford a $10k air conditioner. They happen to have one, but they can't afford another one. Their only option is to go into debt for $10k over $5 worth of copper or perhaps they could go rob 2000 other people of $5 worth of copper.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Supposedly they have done something locally where you have to have a contractor's license to recycle copper, but undoubtedly there is some black market or you could just give some to a contractor who can recycle it and give you a cut.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Cable theft is a scourge that we suffered from years ago already, the policing and punishment of said deed being lamentable. Most of us, as a result of what appeared to be bumbling inefficiency on the part of our national telecom were forced to go 3g for internet and phone as our areas were declared 'high crime' areas cables were not replaced, our neighborhood was placed in this category even though it was a low crime area, at the time I wondered why our telecom guys were not interested in correcting that error. This, ultimately, exposed the scam, the 3g guys were indirectly behind most of cable theft as they stood to make a bundle from us having to movie to them because there was no other option. Our national telecom eventually 'rewarded' the private telecom guys for their deeds by giving us a 3g service at a tenth of the price, the private guys can't compete as they are forced to use the local telecom as a backbone for their service. I have mixed feelings about this as the cheapest wireless service still costs ten times more than the wire service
I didn't read any evidence of trying to sell fibre to a recycler, my first thought would be Denial Of Service attack, screw TCP/UDP packets which can be filtered when you can just rip out the cable and cause a couple of days downtime with no other solution than replace and only takes a couple of minutes of work. I'm surprised this hasn't happened to the new NSA datacenter in Utah or wherever.