How we dealt with a THIEF bringing in stolen material to our scrap yard!

We recently had an encounter with a burglar in our new

yard

and I just want to tell you a little bit about how that unfolded and how we handled the situation. It just so happened that I was in that

yard

on the day that the customer was

bringing

that

material

and he was

bringing

new copper pipes that had been cut into small pieces and brass valves that had been cut in half and it seemed a little strange that everything It was new

material

, so I kind of questioned. I told the client a little about where he got the material from and how he got it, but he claimed to have been a contractor and that he rebuilds or renovates apartment buildings and all of this was just leftovers from a work that I still like.

I felt like that was a little strange because why would you cut new material into pieces where it can't be used? So I just warned him like, hey, you know, we took pictures of all this stuff and it's going to be available to the police. yes they came looking and he was cool, said it was no big deal, no problem and he still sold the stuff like anyone else would and it still didn't sit well with me so I warned the office staff that , if someone comes, When looking for copper and brass, we might want to keep this guy in mind, so the total amount of that material he brought in was about $1800 in

scrap

and of course every time you have copper , we pay automatically with a check, but the next day.

This customer came back saying they had lost the check and asked us to reissue it, but before we reissue any check, we always make sure it hasn't already been cashed and if it hasn't, we will stop payment. Before we reissue a new one, we'll find out that the check had already been cashed and he was asking for a new one, but then of course he came up with an elaborate story about how his brother must have

stolen

the check and cashed it and they had a car accident and all that crazy stuff, but we basically told him we weren't going to reissue the check because it had already been cashed and that was the end of it, but now he's really on our radar because it's two sketchy incidents with the same client and he thinks that he's being clever, but he's not really moving that fast.

A couple of weeks and we have a local business come in and say that someone had broken into their fence, gotten behind one of their buildings and

stolen

an aluminum angle and Our first option is always to tell customers to file a police report and the police will contact us directly and we will work with them, but in this scenario the business owner had said that he already contacted the police and that they were having It was really difficult to track who could have stolen that material, but he had a photo of the truck from their security camera, so we went through all of our old tickets to try to find a similar truck or similar type material and what do you know, that truck ended up matching the suspicious guy who brought in the copper and brass stolen, so we called that company and told them that we were pretty sure that we knew exactly who was stealing their material and that we were more than happy to try to work with them to resolve it because, at the end of the day, we don't want stolen material no way and so after contacting that company again they put the police on the line and the police came and took all of our information and got all of the pictures that we had saved and all of the vehicle information , a copy of his ID, all that good stuff and he definitely ended up being the guy who was robbing his business. and after we discovered that, we notified the police.

Hey, we didn't have a very good feeling about this guy, we told him some of the stories about the check fraud that he was trying to pull off and stuff, and also. We gave him a warning and pictures of the material he had brought and sold after this whole scenario played out and the local police department was able to investigate it further. They called us again to thank us for being attentive and trying. to help them because they weren't getting any other leads from anywhere else and they were finally able to hold that guy accountable for stealing that material and unfortunately they figure that he had probably done this to a lot of other companies and there will probably be more in the future.

There are cases that arise when people start to discover that their stuff is missing, but I'm really just sharing this story with you so you can understand from our perspective how much we really don't want stolen material and how we will go out of our way to help that help. to prevent that from happening