By admin 
More than a dozen thieves are stealing copper right of the Midlands’ telephone poles, some of them using professional-looking bucket trucks to make off with thousands of dollars’ worth of the expensive metal.
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Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said Tuesday that his office has dealt with 60 such incidents in the past 10 months, out of more than 100 spread across Lexington and Richland counties.
“We need help,” Lott told a press conference at the department’s Two Notch headquarters. “It’s not one or two, it’s quite a few, and they’re killing us and our community.”
Reports of thieves using professional-looking ladders and bucket trucks to scale telephone poles and cut power lines have preceded entire neighborhoods losing phone and internet service, the sheriff said. Even the high prices the stolen copper can fetch don’t match the damage being done to communities, he said.
“If you see a truck or a car, see someone climbing a ladder or a pole, and they don’t look legit, that’s a 911 call, that’s a crime in progress,” Lott said.
Just two weeks ago, Columbia police arrested two people who were seen stealing copper off of utility wires in a Columbia neighborhood. William Morgan, 53, and Charley Zorn, 23, were arrested in connection to the thefts, charged with unlawful sale of nonferrous metals, possession of burglary tools, petit larceny and theft of electric current.
Sheriff’s deputies charged Michael McCraw, 58, with obtaining goods under false pretenses for allegedly selling the pilfered copper, Lott said.
Copper thefts across the Midlands
The sheriff said the copper stolen in that instance was worth around $38,000. Those charged in this case are among an estimated 15 to 20 active copper thieves operating more or less independently across the Midlands.
“Some of them are connected, and some are not,” Lott said.
On July 21, a Lexington County sheriff’s deputy was called to the 300 block of Dogwood Road near West Columbia by an AT&T technician after several phone customers in the area lost service, according to an incident report. The phone company suspected a wire had been cut, and the technician told the deputy a wire had been cut between two poles 300 feet apart.
Investigators suspect that the brazen thieves used professional equipment to make the theft.
“The suspects most likely used a bucket truck to access the wire,” the deputy was told, according to an incident report. “He stated it was probably a white, unmarked bucket truck because the suspects did not climb the poles but instead cut the wire in the middle section between the poles.”
The thieves made off with about $8,000 worth of copper wire.
The incident report notes that similar incidents have been reported in both Richland and Lexington counties. The report mentions a recent arrest by Cayce police after a similar theft on Airport Boulevard.
Thefts like this are common enough that investigators have a standard procedure. The technician cut a section of the wire and provided it to investigators to check for fingerprints. Photos were also taken of the scene, but “rain had occurred the previous night, which likely eliminated any ground evidence,” the report says.
Lott said Tuesday that public cooperation is needed to catch copper thieves in the act, and witnesses should check trucks and vests for company names and logos, and be mindful of when they see people climbing the poles.
“They’re not going to be out at 10 or 11 o’clock at night,” Lott said.
Recycling processors are the most likely to receive stolen copper, and the sheriff warned buyers to check licenses before they purchase any dubious metals.
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In other instances, thieves have stolen copper off of cell towers instead of telephone polls. At least three such instances have occurred in Lexington County in the past couple months.
On June 24, someone scaled 40 feet up a cell tower on the 200 block of Shealy Road near Batesburg and made off with 480 feet of copper coax cable, the phone company reported. The stolen copper was worth about $15,000.
There were no signs of forced entry at the fence surrounding the cell tower, and it is believed the thief knew the padlock combination on the gate, the report says.
In another incident, multiple cables containing copper were reported stolen from a tower on the 200 block of Lewie Road in the Leesville area. Cables as high as 30 feet off the ground were stolen from this tower, including a dozen belonging to AT&T, 11 from Verizon and two from Sprint. Different phone companies’ equipment will often share space on the same tower.
Up to $12,000 of copper were believed to have been stolen in this instance. The engineer on site “voiced his suspicions that the suspect could be a vendor or past vendor or employee who knew the lock combinations and possessed the knowledge of which cables contained copper.” But the deputy also noted “at least one gap between the chain-link fence and the gravel that a human could have gotten through.”
Another tower on Sam Dennis Road was hit June 12. The technician who reported the theft couldn’t provide an estimate of the value of the stolen cables, but said they would cost about $60,000 for the phone company to replace. Again, no forced entry was noted, and the thief apparently “had knowledge of what to cut and what not to cut,” the incident report said.
Why copper?
Copper prices have soared in the last five years, according to copper futures data, growing from $1.90 per pound in July 2021 to more than $6.30 per pound in July 2026.
The rapid growth of copper prices comes as a wave of AI data centers are set to be built or proposed across the country — and investors are thinking ahead about copper’s place at the center of an increasingly digitized future.
There are already 11 operational data centers in South Carolina, with at least nine more on the way as of July, The State reported. As construction and expansions get underway, the demand for copper – which has the strong conduction and thermal regulation abilities needed for energy-intensive AI – is predicted to only increase.
That change has not gone unnoticed by some thieves.
Copper, as well as being a critical component in AI infrastructure, can also be found in older phone lines, creating an easy target for those wishing to resell the valuable red metal.
Sometimes, newer fiber optic cables are cut in search of copper, costing telecommunications companies dearly, according to a TV and tech industry trade group, NCTA.
There were more than 15,000 attacks nationwide that caused significant interruption to telecommunications services, including broadband internet, between June 2024 and June 2025, the group reported in October.
What’s more, the cost of these attacks is often passed onto consumers. According to Western Carolina economics professor Edward Lopez, estimates of the “costs on society” of damage were between $38 million and $188 million from April 2025 to October 2025.
And consumers with more than just their wallets.
“These incidents do not just cut cables, they cut people off from commerce, education, healthcare, and public safety,” Lopez wrote in an . “Communications infrastructure attacks are not abstract or far away problems.”
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