Copper cable theft rampant amid pandemic, high prices

Theft of copper cables is an old problem in Brazil, as well as in other Latin American countries, but has risen during the pandemic especially as prices of the metal have soared, statistics show.

The issue affects people in a variety of ways, from power and internet cuts to failures of traffic lights.

In São Paulo, from January to September 2020 transit authorities reported 3,228 cases of theft of copper wires, an increase of 116% over 2019. 

In the first half of 2020, the local traffic company replaced 15,000m of cables stolen from traffic lights.

The cases led to losses of 10mn reais (US$1.84mn) for traffic engineering authority CET, which attributes the increase to the pandemic’s effects as poverty and unemployment accelerated by the health crisis might have pushed more people to engage in the illegal cooper trade.

In Belo Horizonte, one of the six largest cities in Brazil, power distributor Cemig also says theft of copper cables has become increasingly common, leading to interruption in the supply of energy, malfunctioning traffic signs and inoperable telephone networks.

To deal with the issue, Cemig says it is investing in a system to monitor cables and to report cases of disruptions in the transmission and distribution networks.

The project, currently underway, involves implementing fiber optics into the power grid. With the optical fiber in the cable core, it is possible to identify the attempted theft of cables in advance, since the fiber can also serve as a noise sensor, according to the company.

Besides, the hybrid network makes it harder for criminals to extract the copper.

“Because this cabling is partly metallic wires and partly optical fiber wires in a single set, it becomes more difficult for criminals to separate the materials to sell on the black market. This will inhibit theft of the components of the electric power distribution network,” Cemig’s chief technical engineer Carlos Nascimento said in a statement.

In federal capital Brasília, the losses of CEB Distribuição in 2019, prior to the pandemic, were already the second highest in the last 14 years. That year, more than 42,000m of copper cables were stolen.

In Rio de Janeiro, a survey by the local association of telecommunications companies found that 4Mm of copper cables were stolen in 2019, generating estimated losses of 700mn reais and harming 5mn users.

“Theft only occurs because there are people who buy the stolen material,” André Ferreira, senior corporate security consultant at Israeli-based security firm ICTS Security, said in a release.

Ferreira said authorities must act on the receiver-end, usually companies that process small amounts of scrap. At that stage, the copper cable, already stripped and burned, is resold as larger scrap.

At the top of this pyramid are large copper plants, according to the consultant, which end up buying illegal raw material even without their direct knowledge.

"At this level, it is almost impossible to trace the origin of the raw material, which is crushed and reprocessed to enter the market again," according to Ferreira.

“Intelligence actions to reach recipients and the enforcement of stricter penalties are the ways to reduce this type of crime," he said.

In recent years, telecom companies have worked on decommissioning copper cables and other metallic cables, replacing them with more resilient and faster optical fiber, a material that does not have as much commercial value as copper.

Nonetheless, fiber optic cables are commonly mistaken for metallic cables and equally end up being vandalized.

Thefts are so common that a telecom operator in Rio de Janeiro placed a sign in one of its urban cable boxes to advise thieves on the material used.

The sign read: "There is no copper here. No value."