Law enforcement agencies in Illinois, Kentucky and Ohio reportedly cooperated to track stolen copper and the truck that transported it.  A shipment of copper products reportedly worth more than $580,000 that was stolen through a fraudulent freight scheme has been recovered after a cooperative effort by law enforcement agencies in three states. The crime and the private sector and law enforcement tracking that followed has been detailed by freight industry trade media group FreightWaves, Chattanooga, Tennessee.The media outlet reports police turned to GPS tracking performed by national freight company Schneider to identify where the truck carrying the stolen copper went after the theft was reported. "Investigators used Schneider GPS data to locate all six pallets and later tracked the company’s stolen equipment to Ohio," writes FreightWaves, adding, "Authorities recovered the cargo and equipment within eight hours after law enforcement received notification [last Friday, and] police took three people into custody in Kentucky and one in Ohio." The suspects involved, who are not named in the FreightWaves article, used what the media group calls "a legitimate motor carrier’s identity and published contact information to obtain" the stolen cargo. The article’s author Phil Brink credits New Jersey-based CargoNet and its employee Shannon Elliott for contacting the Cook County, Illinois, sheriff’s department—where the cargo was stolen, helping set in motion a response that eventually involved law enforcement officers in that state plus Kentucky and Ohio. Although the original shipping manifest called for the copper-bearing materials to be shipped from Illinois to South Carolina, the stolen goods were found in Prestonburg, Kentucky, and the truck and trailer used in the crime were found in Chillicothe, Ohio. Metals theft has been problematic for scrap recyclers and construction and demolition contractors for more than a dozen years, made worse in the mid-2020s by the escalating value of copper and aluminum. In the first 15 days of this month, the ScrapTheftAlert system operated in part by the Washington-based Recycled Materials Association (ReMA) sent out five metals theft incident alerts. That follows 11 incident alerts sent in August and eight in July.
Read more at: https://www.recyclingtoday.com/news/copper-cargo-theft-tracking-crime-solved-illinois-kentucky-ohio/