The article describes a ring that doesn’t involve scrap yards. It’s a different kind of hustle where precious metals are extracted from the inside.

I don't get it either. I literally had to replace the cat on my car after it started throwing a check engine light. I took the old one to a scrap yard, and the amount of info they asked me for was crazy. They wanted the VIN of the car, all of the car information like make, model, color, etc, then photocopied my ID and kept records of it. This is in Washington, so it may vary by state. You'd think this would be enough, but there's someone who is not asking questions...

So many scrap yards are out of business in our area now too, I don't get where people are taking them to. Maybe people are taking them out of state to where people don't ask questions.

There used to be a local scrap metal yard in Houston that advertised on TV: "We pay in two-dollar bills!" (Translation: We pay cash, which means you can't be traced.) I haven't seen that ad lately, thought.

Then how would we expect a legitimate mechanic to replace one?

Then they can show their mechanic's license. There's no reason for Joe off the street to come in with a backpack full of these things. Especially ones that are brand new. Here's 20 stolen from a dealership the other night - https://abc13.com/la-porte-car-dealership-theft-catalytic-co...

>Then they can show their mechanic's license.

Scrapyards already need licenses (permits). Adding licensing requirements will just result in the people with licenses buying from the thiefs. It's just another middleman in the chain.

If anything it makes the problem worse because scrapyards often do turn away obvious thieves. A mechanic showing up with ten legit converters and forty stolen ones he bought off the thief gives the scrapyard plausible deniability. Furthermore it moves the illicit transaction outside of a legit commercial establishment and to wherever the thief and the mechanic care to meet.

It's already acknowledged that without enforcement against the people who are actually cutting the cats off regulatory requirements just displace the problem and shift the profit around.

Being a mechanic doesn't require a license although running the commercial establishment generally has some permitting requirements.

> Adding licensing requirements will just result in the people with licenses buying from the thiefs.

Lets think about this situation in programming terms. "Fixing this exploit will just result in the people finding another bug to exploit".

Well... yeah. That's the point. You don't necessarily want to stop all crimes (I mean, you do, but that's just unreasonable). Everyone is happy with simple deterrence: making crime harder to do and harder to logically manage.

And you keep fixing the law until the criminals / unwanted behavior is finally fixed. You gotta start somewhere, much like you gotta start fixing code exploits if you want to fix the security in your software.

This is the thinking that got us:

1) the mess that is DRM, whether for software or media, and

2) to the point of 10-step windows activation (including phone calls and having to reinstall because one version only takes retail keys and another only takes oem keys and another only uses network auth), and

3) video games that try and re-authenticate between every frame of play

And tons of other "fixes" that just punish users and don't really deter bad behavior.

Software is bad enough; we shouldn't need to authenticate our exhaust system before recycling it.

How often does your average person sell scrap parts? I don't think the situations are analogous.

The gross sum of time spent tracing the origins of scrap will be greater than money lost due to theft.

The answer is mitigated risk via insurance and prevention, not a preemptive policing of all privately owned items of value.

> The gross sum of time spent tracing the origins of scrap will be greater than money lost due to theft.

I am quite skeptical that this is true.

The people that do it as a hobby/side gig probably go through 2-25 cars/yr with the people on the higher end doing more scrapping and less individual part selling.

Yes, we can always dream up some extreme case where somebody would find it onerous. How should we weigh that against a lot of people who are just trying to use their car to get to work having their catalytic converters stolen?

This isn't fixing an exploit. It's slapping a manager review on anything that gets run on the prod DB.

Adding another middleman makes the thefts less efficient and less profitable for the thieves. Sounds like a win to me. Sure, it doesn't stop it completely. So what?

If they're not getting prosecuted enough to make them stop adding middle men and reducing profit means they'll steal more cats to get their fix.

"Mechanic's license"?

I got this.

The "Mechanics License" is an informal certification that all reputable technicians in the US employ and is widely recognized. It's a form of de-facto licensure that's easily recognized at a glancing distance, and serves to ensure that a mechanic is not going to leave on a moments notice, without at least bolting a wheel on. Instead, he or she will tell the foreman or whomever's name is on the sign, likely to call a tow truck for Friday.

It goes like this: Once a young apprentice lube tech graduates from Harbor F. University, an unusual ritual occurs in most mechanic's shops where a large, diesel, truck with a lift gate and a Square terminal approaches.

A nondescript individual emerges from the truck, (slowly, as to not alarm anybody who has a pending tab) where our young acolyte is soon taken gingerly by the hand and ushered onto this mysterious conveyance.

Seven or Eight hundred dollars later, the young, oily apprentice emerges holding a shiny, new, silver gun and possibly a ratchet and a t-shirt or pocket protector.

Most seasoned veterans will recognize this as their Mechanic's License. It's good for brake jobs, mostly.

If you foul up to many times in the shop, they call the MAC or Snap-On guy who will gun it in his diesel and demand full payment for the impact tool and ratchet. They usually get to keep the shirt though, because, yuck, you know?

Many US states require auto repair businesses to be registered, which would be a reasonable thing to tie back to (if this was a reasonable idea in the first place, which it isn't).

I used to work at an exhaust shop. We sold catalytic converters to a scrap yard (we also had a separate dumpster for scrap metal that they picked up weekly as well). We needed to show receipts for purchased cats that matched what we scrapped, so if we scrapped 50 we needed to show we had sold at least 50. Although the main reason for that was environmental, it was to prevent shops from removing converters and straight piping the vehicle. However, it also did help to prevent theft, although I don't know if the yard checked thoroughly for non-commercial customers.

Why would the mechanic need to sell it to a scrapyard?

I wonder if most shops buy their parts from a distributor who takes them back, most often called a "core charge".

Seems like it would be a way to make such regulation work if so.

So it doesn't clutter up the shop.

The same reason they scrap the mountains of other used non-working parts they generate.

>You should have to have the tittle for the car to bring a converter in, since it’s a federal offense to remove them.

If my eyes could roll in a complete circle they would.

Nobody who is parting out cars (resulting in a decent number of legitimately owned cats lying around to scrap) is bringing in the title because cheap junk often changes hands without a title and if not you gave the title to the junkyard in order for them to take the bare shell without you cutting it up.

And how is the scrap yard supposed to figure out which cat matches which title?

(the other guy covered the mechanic use case so I won't)

A potentially less bad idea: circulate a list of known stolen catalytic converters by serial number, and encourage scrappers not to buy them/help find who stole them.

I think this is done with bikes in a lot of places.