Container theft ring busted in China

A television station based in south China’s Guangdong Province is reporting that seven people who were part of a theft ring that broke into sealed containers full of scrap metal have been arrested near Guangzhou, China.

A July 23, 2015, televised news report on GDTV shows footage of stacked 40-foot containers taken to a location in Foshan, China, a prefecture west of Guangzhou that is home to many scrap yards and secondary metals production plants.

Additional footage includes interviews with police and with a regional scrap buyer who had been a victim of the ring. They describe an operation where red metal (copper and brass) scrap was hand-picked and removed from loads of shredded mixed metal scrap, such as zorba. One of the people interviewed explains how dirt was shoveled into containers after the copper scrap was taken to maintain its recorded weight.

The three-and-one-half-minute Chinese-language report (with some segments in Mandarin, others in Cantonese) also shows a collection of dozens of replacement container seals that likely would have been used to replace seals broken when containers were entered into illegally.

The culling of copper-bearing scrap from mixed loads placed into containers would prove profitable for the thieves but would then result in widely varying copper percentages for the recipients of the containers compared with the shippers. The broken criminal ring and others like it have likely contributed to claims and ill will between mixed metal scrap exporters around the world and the importers in China who buy their materials.

Scrap recyclers have long complained of theft from containers in south China and Hong Kong, with the crime rings in that region having been the focus of attention at a Bureau of International Recycling (BIR) session in 2012.