The brazen acts you will see in the photos below displays the level of risk criminals will take to get their sticky hands on copper cables.
As reported by Twitter microblogger @crimeairnetwork, images taken from CCTV footage showed two unidentified men hard at work, detangling and attempting to cut up the copper cables that run along the railway tracks at Wadeville train station in Germiston, Gauteng, on Thursday afternoon.
See pics: Copper cable thieves caught in action
It is not clear, at this stage, if the copper cable thieves were nabbed but these CCTV snapshots were released showing their brazen stunts.
How much does copper sell for in the black market?
Copper cables are worth a lot of money in the black market. This explains the scale of risk thugs take to get their hands on a few meters of the coveted cable.
In Kraaifontein, a suburb north of Cape Town, a Northpine community’s electricity was cut out for an entire day after thieves found their way into an Eskom substation and ripped out the copper cables.
There is no level of consciousness that will stop a cable thief from getting his hands on the prized copper. After all, according to Scrap Metal Pricer, the non-ferrous metal is the most sought-after in South Africa.
Scrapyards pay around R60 per kilogram of the metal and often, thieves who steal copper cables will burn them to qualify the wire as Grade 2 Copper, which brings a higher sale value when sold as scrap than insulated wire.
Not only is this illegal — above the act of stealing the cables — but it poses an ecological threat to the environment.
However, criminals without conscience care very little about such ‘frivolities’.
In 2019 alone, South Africa’s Passenger Rail Agency (Prasa) lost an estimated R349 million to copper cable theft.