Organized crime by Junk Yard owners
The major obstacle in running a Junk Yard is theft materials. Every now and then the police raid junk yards for stolen goods and harass innocent owners. Like any material scrap cannot be identified from where it was scrapped, picked up or salvaged from. Petty thieves burgle air conditioners, copper tubing, earth rods of transformers and sell it at the yards.
These materials cannot be identified as theft because one cannot have a record on the scrap materials. Scrap theft is prevailing in not only developing countries but also in developed countries like the US and UK. When someone sells a truck load of scrap at the yard, the owner cannot scrutinize every material and inquire the origin of it. Most of the times they are weighed with the truck and then dumped. Sometimes back we had some pipe bombs in one of the yards in India. It is very difficult to keep an inventory on who sold what.
A solution for this is installing a camera in the purchase section and recording every purchase made in the yard. It has its limitations as well. It is not so easy to find the seller of a particular piece of material from the recordings and truck loads of materials cannot be recorded precisely.
While the above issues are faced by innocent scrap yard owners, there are criminals in the industry who cater organized crime. In India there are certain places where you can sell a bike without any papers. All you have to do is ride in there and sell it off; within minutes it gets dismantled and become a heap of used spare parts. The criminals are believed to hire professional thieves to steal the automobiles and other scrap parts.
There are high-level operators (!) who hire people to steal cars, trucks and two wheelers and low level guys who employ rag pickers and beggars to steal any copper cable, tubing, telephone wires in the open. These are the guys who pickup the manhole covers, sign boards etc and cash them. Until now I had been under the impression that these organized scrap theft is happening in developing countries only. I was surprised to see that this takes place in countries like the United States.
Have a look at this. http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/mar/05/da-thinks-big-scrap-metal-case/
Our request to criminal scrap yard owners is that, Please change your business. Better rob a bank than organizing scrap thefts. This is killing the business of the majority innocent scrap yard owners.