Copper prices are rising. Thieves are taking notice

CNN

By Samantha Delouya, CNN

Los Angeles (CNN) — Often strung from utility poles or buried beneath our feet, copper wire has played a critical role in powering America’s electrical grid for more than a century.

But brazen thefts are threatening the grid, with thieves climbing onto car roofs to cut down telephone lines or prying open manholes in broad daylight to strip copper wiring.

The effects have been felt nationwide: roads and bridges going dark, 911 calls that fail to connect and higher utility bills as replacement costs get passed on to consumers.

The price of copper has driven the thefts, said one detective at the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department who requested anonymity due to the undercover nature of his role.

This year, copper prices have reached all-time highs on a jump in new data center construction and speculation about new tariffs by the Trump administration, according to JPMorgan. In the United States, copper prices have climbed more than 30% this year.

Los Angeles has become one of the nation’s hot spots for copper wire theft. As the city recovers from its most destructive wildfires in a generation and prepares to host the World Cup this summer and the Olympics in 2028, it’s struggling in many places just to keep the lights on. The city and the utility companies spend millions each year repairing the damage.

There were more than 15,000 destructive attacks nationwide on domestic communication networks between June 2024 and June 2025, with copper theft a major driver, according to the TV and internet industry trade group, NCTA. More than 9.5 million customers were affected, with California and Texas alone accounting for over half of the incidents.

“This doesn’t happen just once a week or once a month,” the LASD detective said of copper thefts. “These things happen daily.”

Seven miles of copper wire, gone

When Los Angeles unveiled its newly built Sixth Street Bridge in 2022, it was hailed as a new city landmark. At night, the 3,500-foot bridge, with wide pedestrian walkways, would light up in shifting LED colors.

Three years later, the bridge sits dark.

Thieves have stolen more than 38,000 feet, or seven miles, of copper wire from the bridge, causing $2.5 million in damage, according to Mark González, the local assemblymember who represents the area.

“We have multiple incidents just in our areas each day. It adds up,” the undercover LASD detective said, adding that construction sites in LA, where homes are being rebuilt after January’s Palisades and Eaton wildfires claimed more than 16,000 homes and structures, are frequent targets for thieves.

It’s very hard to trace stolen bare copper, the detective told CNN. While some telecom companies use colored paper coating to help identify their wires, city wiring is less easily identifiable. Any fix would be expensive for the city.

“For now, it’s kind of the Wild West,” the detective added.

The Sixth Street Bridge isn’t an isolated case. As copper prices climb, streetlight outages have become a persistent problem across Los Angeles. Theft- and vandalism-related outages increased tenfold between 2017 and 2022, according to the city’s Bureau of Street Lighting.

In a statement to CNN, a spokesperson for Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass called copper wire theft “not just a nuisance, but a threat to public safety.”

“When Angelenos are left with dark lit streets, downed telecommunications wires or malfunctioning traffic signals, due to this dangerous criminal activity, people are left vulnerable and communities are at greater risk of other crimes,” the spokesperson said, adding that the city is pushing to install more solar-powered streetlights that aren’t wired with copper to curb the problem.

The detective said that although thieves can sometimes get a couple hundred dollars for their stolen copper, it can cost the city thousands of dollars to repair the damage the thieves cause.

“If we didn’t know that somebody was doing it for financial gain, we would probably assume it was a case of domestic terrorism,” due to the amount of destruction caused by copper thieves, he said.

In October, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a new bill attempting to tackle copper wire theft by increasing penalties and cracking down on junk dealers and recyclers who buy stolen copper.

The state joins 12 others that have passed legislation in 2025 to crack down on copper wire theft.

AT&T spends millions tackling copper theft

Just a short drive from Los Angeles’ Exposition Park, the historic Olympic venue set to anchor events at the 2028 summer games, copper thieves pried open a manhole in the middle of the street in January and tunneled into an AT&T facility that serves thousands of area residents.

Hundreds of pounds of copper wire was cut and hauled out through the manhole, knocking out phone service for hundreds of AT&T customers. The company says it covered the opening with a 2,000-pound steel plate, but, somehow, thieves got in again. By July, AT&T gave up on plates and sealed the manhole with concrete.

AT&T is racing to replace its old copper network with faster, more efficient fiber-optic lines, but the transition can only move as quickly as customers decide to switch phone plans.

Each of AT&T’s copper strands connects to a single household’s landline, and hundreds of these hair-thin wires are bundled into a single thick cable. Until every customer migrates to fiber, AT&T has to keep those copper connections live, leaving miles of valuable metal in the ground or on poles and vulnerable to theft.

“A lot of times they (thieves) don’t know what is copper versus fiber,” said Jeff Luong, vice president of engineering at AT&T. “So they’re just cutting cables,” causing further service outage.

AT&T says copper wire thefts are rising sharply, reporting 2,200 incidents in California in 2024, up from 71 in 2021. The company has since announced rewards of up to $20,000 for information on the crimes.

Andrea Moore, a director of construction and engineering at AT&T in Los Angeles, said she often visits local recyclers to track down stolen wire. Some are cooperative, but she said that some choose to look the other way when buying stolen goods.

Moore said she can often tell which recyclers are “bad actors” because she’ll find coating from AT&T cables disposed of right outside those facilities. California’s new law, which takes effect next year, aims to hold these recyclers more accountable.

AT&T executives say they’re constantly racing to stay a step ahead, but too often, they’re losing. The company shelled out more than $60 million last year on copper theft alone, according to Susan Santana, AT&T’s California state president.

“Remember, it’s not just the $60 million impact to our bottom line,” Santana said. “Think about the 911 calls that are not being made or the hospitals that can’t use their equipment because the internet is down.”

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