Last week GM was awoken in the middle of the night by a loud mechanical noise. It lasted for about 20 seconds, then stopped. Although confused, GM was also pretty tired, and went swiftly back to sleep.
The next morning, however, he was reminded of the noise and checked his security cameras to see if they captured anything interesting. And boy did they.
In the clip above, you see two men approach the car of one of GM’s neighbors. They quickly jack up the car and take a look under the floor. Then they take some sort of a angle grinder to the exhaust system (hence the noise) and in less than a minute they were out of there, with GM’s neighbor’s catalytic converter with them.
Catalytic converters are the part of the car that “cleans up” exhaust before it’s sent out the muffler. And they are quite expensive to replace because they use precious metals like platinum and palladium. As a result, thieves target this item. It helps that it is so easy and quick to steal, as the video shows. And catalytic converters from Priuses (that is GM’s neighbor’s car) are especially targeted by thieves as they are built to deal with the hybrid vehicles higher heat.
So if you, like GM’s neighbor, wake up to find that your car all the sudden sounds like WWII tank when you start it in the morning, you may have become another victim of these cat burglars.
The Georgetown Metropolitan 