April 9, 2025
The U.S. communications infrastructure plays a critical role in the nation’s security, economy, operation of government, and in the daily lives of most Americans. Vital sectors of society and the nation’s economy, such as public safety, health care, energy, transportation, finance, information technology, and education increasingly rely on communications infrastructure. To protect economic and public safety interests, regulators, legislators, law enforcement, municipalities, and communications providers must work together to address this growing threat.
The rising market value of copper, which is used in many communications facilities, has provided bad actors with an economic incentive to target multiple industries’ infrastructure (e.g., public utilities, transportation, etc.) nationwide through criminal acts of theft and vandalism. The bad actors then sell this metal and other stolen communications equipment. Critical communications infrastructure alone has experienced more than 5,700 intentional incidents of theft and vandalism between June to December 2024. In the indiscriminate search for copper, even modern communications facilities, such as fiber-optic transmission lines and wireless communications towers that have no copper, have been sabotaged.
These incidents of theft and vandalism have become increasingly common and create unnecessary service disruptions that threaten and harm American citizens, consumers and businesses. The resulting damage and resources necessary to repair the affected networks harmed by criminal conduct imposes millions of dollars of direct and indirect costs on communications network providers, consumers and the economy.
This paper seeks to increase awareness of this growing problem by highlighting:
- The greater need for collaboration among the communications industry, the scrap metal industry, state and local jurisdictions, law enforcement and law makers
- The central and problematic role of demand side copper sale transactions
- The proactive efforts by communications network providers to protect their assets, as well as recent best practices initiated by state and local governments to help stem the tide of this growing problem
- Law enforcement’s critical role in recognizing, investigating and prosecuting incidents of intentional theft and damage
- The need to examine and update existing state statutes to ensure laws are in place or strengthened to penalize the intentional theft or vandalism of critical infrastructure, cover all aspects of communications networks, make financial transactions between thieves and the recycling industry more difficult, and ensure enhanced penalties are enforced to deter future bad acts.