When you think about theft, you probably picture someone swiping a wallet, breaking into a car, or maybe shoplifting electronics. You don’t think about someone pulling up behind a Chick-fil-A at 3 a.m. with a gas-powered pump and a rental truck from Home Depot, siphoning hundreds of gallons of old fryer grease. But that’s exactly what’s happening — and it’s just one piece of a much weirder picture.
Across the country, thieves are going after stuff most of us wouldn’t think twice about. Used cooking oil. Copper wiring buried underground. License plates. Even collectible plush toys clipped off people’s backpacks. The common thread? These things are worth a lot more than you’d guess, and criminals have figured that out faster than the rest of us.
Used Cooking Oil Is Now Called “Liquid Gold”
Let’s start with the strangest one. In December 2025, federal prosecutors in Des Moines charged 13 people in what can only be described as a grease heist ring. The operation spanned 10 states — Iowa, Illinois, Tennessee, Minnesota, Indiana, Ohio, Alabama, Nebraska, Missouri, and Kentucky. Trucks hauled stolen oil to warehouses in Nevada, Iowa, Tennessee, Alabama, and Ohio, where it was sold and the money laundered.
This wasn’t a couple of guys with a pickup truck. This was organized crime, with defendants from five different states running a racketeering conspiracy built entirely around used cooking oil.
Why? Because that nasty, dark-brown grease sitting in bins behind your favorite restaurant can be refined into biodiesel, jet fuel, and livestock feed. Tax credits for converting it into renewable energy have driven up prices so much that the industry calls it “yellow grease” — and the black market treats it like gold. An estimated $75 million worth of used cooking oil is stolen every year in the U.S. Thieves can haul in thousands of dollars in a single night, hitting 20 or more restaurants before the sun comes up.
The really wild part is that restaurants often don’t even know they’ve been hit. If nobody checks the outdoor grease containers regularly, the theft goes completely unnoticed. In Suffolk County, New York, police reported more than 100 cases in 2023. In Athens, Georgia, over 800 gallons were stolen from a single Chick-fil-A location. On the East Coast, one ring of 21 people stole roughly $3.4 million worth of oil.
Rental Trucks and Homemade Hose Adapters
Detective Aaron Woelkers from Bensalem Township, Pennsylvania, has described the typical setup: thieves rent a Home Depot or Penske box truck, load it with 275-gallon plastic tote tanks and gas-powered pumps, then drive around overnight pumping oil out of restaurant storage containers. Some bins are so poorly secured that it takes almost no effort. In harder cases, cops have found cut locks, holes carved into containers, and homemade hose adapters rigged to fit specialized coupler ports.
Cooking oil theft was practically unheard of before 2022. Since then, it’s exploded. And one of the biggest problems making it worse? Many recycling companies that buy used oil don’t ask questions. No business credentials, no documentation. You just show up with oil and they hand you money. That’s like a pawn shop buying gold jewelry without asking for an ID — except somehow it’s still legal in most places.
Catalytic Converter Theft Dipped — Now It’s Back
You might remember hearing about catalytic converter theft a few years ago. It surged to over 64,000 incidents in 2022. State Farm alone paid out $115.4 million for 45,000 claims that year. By 2024, those numbers had dropped hard — down to about 7,600 claims and $22 million in payouts. A lot of people assumed the problem was over.
It wasn’t. In St. Paul, Minnesota — a city with some of the strictest anti-theft laws in the country — catalytic converter theft nearly tripled in 2025, jumping from 172 incidents to 504. That’s a 193% increase in one year, in a place specifically designed to prevent this crime.
The reason is simple: precious metal prices bounced back. Rhodium, one of the rare metals inside converters, hit $10,400 per ounce as of early 2026. Platinum smashed an all-time record of $2,475 per ounce in December 2025. A single Toyota Prius converter can contain several thousand dollars’ worth of rhodium. Professional thieves can cut one off your car in 60 to 90 seconds with a battery-powered saw.
Since 2021, 31 states have passed laws targeting this specific crime. New York’s law requires scrap dealers to photograph sellers, keep records for five years, and verify sellers are the actual registered vehicle owners. It worked — thefts in New York City fell 80% between 2022 and 2024. But as metal prices keep climbing, even good laws are getting tested.
Copper Is the New Catalytic Converter
As catalytic converter theft slowed (temporarily), copper theft stepped in to fill the gap. AT&T alone has lost $40 million to copper theft nationwide in 2025, with $2.2 million of that coming from Missouri. The company is offering $20,000 rewards for information in Missouri and California, and $10,000 in Texas.
Thieves are literally digging up and cutting down AT&T cables to strip out the copper inside. Texas, California, and Missouri are the hardest-hit states. In Los Angeles, cases have increased tenfold in five years, prompting the city council to fund a dedicated LAPD Copper Wire Task Force. In Arcadia, California, someone stole 60 feet of underground copper wire and knocked out 911 service. Think about that — someone’s emergency call didn’t go through because a thief wanted a couple hundred bucks’ worth of metal.
The price of copper keeps rising because demand is through the roof. Electric vehicles require more copper wiring than gas-powered cars, and AI data centers are eating up massive quantities of the stuff. Combine that with tariffs pushing prices higher, and you’ve got HVAC units, building wiring, plumbing, and construction sites all becoming prime targets.
Entire Truckloads Are Vanishing With a Laptop
Here’s one that’ll mess with you: organized crime rings are stealing entire truckloads of goods — not with guns or crowbars, but with computers. Cargo crime hit an all-time high in 2024, rising 27% year-over-year. For the first time, the total value of stolen merchandise topped $1 billion. In the first three months of 2024 alone, $154.6 million in goods disappeared.
California, Illinois, and Texas accounted for 61% of thefts in that quarter. Illinois saw a 126% year-over-year increase. Thieves are using digitally altered paperwork to pick up entire truckloads of products that then vanish into thin air. As one industry VP put it: “It happens behind closed doors. It happens in the dark of night, and the consumer doesn’t really realize it.”
The most frequently stolen items during holiday weekends? Food and beverages, household goods, and electronics. It’s not flashy, but stealing a semi-truck loaded with laundry detergent or frozen food is apparently very, very profitable if you know who to sell it to.
58 Million Stolen Packages and $16 Billion Gone
Porch piracy isn’t new, but the numbers are staggering. According to the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General, at least 58 million packages were stolen in 2024, totaling roughly $16 billion in losses. And online shopping just keeps growing — the National Retail Federation reported a 9% increase in online shopping over the Thanksgiving-to-Cyber Monday weekend compared to the year before. More packages on more porches means more targets.
On top of the physical theft, scammers are impersonating UPS, USPS, FedEx, Amazon, and others with fake delivery notification texts and emails designed to steal personal information. It’s a double whammy — your package gets swiped from your doorstep, and someone else is trying to phish your login credentials at the same time.
Shoplifting Has Become a $115 Billion Problem
Retailers are projected to lose over $115 billion to shoplifting in 2025. Some estimates put it closer to $140 billion. California reported over 50,000 shoplifting incidents in 2024 — a 12% increase. Chicago saw a 46% jump from January to October 2024. A New York shoplifting ring was dismantled in late 2024 after stealing nearly $2 million from retailers like Macy’s and Sephora, reselling the goods both in the U.S. and overseas.
This isn’t all petty theft. Organized retail crime groups deploy networks of “boosters” — people who swipe merchandise from multiple stores in quick succession and funnel it to resellers on auction sites and social media. It’s gotten bad enough that 35% of merchandise in high-risk stores is now locked behind glass or in cabinets. Walmart, Safeway, and Target have all closed stores partly because of theft-related losses.
A survey found that 90% of shoplifters cited inflation as their reason: 34% said prices were unaffordable, 30% said they were trying to make ends meet, and 27% said they were trying to save money. That doesn’t make it legal, but it does paint a grim picture of where things stand.
The Weird Stuff: License Plates, Plush Toys, and Garden Vegetables
And then there’s the truly bizarre category. License plates are one of the most commonly stolen items from cars — thieves use them to “cloak” stolen vehicles used in other crimes. Power tools are a perennial favorite, with nearly 19,000 stolen in Victoria, Australia, alone in one year. EV tires cost more than regular tires, making them an increasingly popular target.
Collectible Labubu dolls — those trendy plush toys sold in blind boxes — have become targets too. In Melbourne, one man was arrested after police found 43 stolen Labubu dolls worth about $9,000. Thieves were literally snipping them off people’s backpacks and purses. Pets are being stolen at increasing rates, and not just expensive breeds. Even community gardens are getting raided for fruits and vegetables, and bricks are being lifted from construction sites.
If there’s a lesson in all of this, it’s that thieves are extremely creative and motivated by whatever has value in the current moment — even if that “something” is a 50-gallon drum of rancid cooking oil sitting behind a Wendy’s.
