My pal Damon sent me the email: 'I just wanted to share something that happened today,... there were guys crawling under the cars and with a battery operated saw they were cutting the catalytic converters off of the cars... The police officer told us the salvage yards will pay up to two grand for them when turned in for recycling.'

I always run emails like this through the 'Snopes' hoax email website, and I found that it is not an email hoax, but is actually happening all over the nation. In fact, the email was originally from the daughter of one of Damon's friends, a young lady named Shannon, who lives in Lacey. Shannon went on to report, '...they had gotten 4 cut off including the truck parked next to ours when the police arrived. The officer said they are very easy to get off and are worth alot of money to a crook,'

I had heard something about this type of crime before, but had chalked it up as an unusual event. But along with the price of petroleum, the value of the precious metals that catalytic converters are made with has skyrocketed and the fact that they relatively easy to steal because of their location on your car has made this form of theft a much more common occurance.

For the uninitiated, catalytic converters, or catcons are tuberous looking things that are installed in the exhaust systems of most automobiles made in this country after 1975. They use screens and other parts manufactured with rare metals like Platinum, palladium and Rhodium to reduce the toxicity of the emissions your car produces when you fire it up and drive it.

In fact, if you have heard a particularly loud Toyota, Jeep Cherokee or other SUV rumbling down the road (they are favored targets) it is entirely possible that it was recently targeted by sawzall and wrench bearing thieves, and that motorist was on his way to a local muffler shop.

I dropped into one local shop to ask what they knew about this annoying criminal activity.

At Walt's Auto Care Center at 341st and Pac Highway, the manager Dean Lilly let me in the back to see a recently removed Catalytic converter.

"We've seen a ration of them in the last six months, they hit a automotive parts warehouse in Auburn a while back, got a bunch of delivery trucks in a fenced yard there." Employee Ed Leando showed me a truck that had just arrived, and right there where the part should be was a gaping hole with some freshly exposed muffler pipe on either end. "They seem to concentrate on larger vehicles like SUVs, they cut the filler neck to the gas tank on this one too." I thought gas siphoning stopped being attractive in the late seventies, but times are apparently getting even harder. Ed held up a converter to show me the guts. Who do you think takes them, Ed? "Junkyards, scrapyards, they can get about 30 bucks for them, more if they take the O2 sensor with it."

The O2 sensor apparently isn't worth anything to the thief, it just becomes a nuisance if it's in the way when they saw the part off, and it's expensive to replace.

In an online search on the topic, I found that the problem is near epidemic in some regions of the country, which some muffler repair shops haven taken note of in order to deter the thefts. Some muffler shops will offer to

'tack weld' the bolts on catcons to make them harder to steal, and a couple of enterprising companies have sprung up with aftermarket devices to help thwart thieves.

American Welding in Ohio sells a substantial looking unit they call the 'CatClamp' for $225 dollars and some Metro area Meineke stores are selling and installing a device called a CatCuff. Both units use stainless steel aircraft cables threaded through plates that mount on either end of the converter.

The idea behind these add-ons is to make your catcon so difficult to remove that the thief will prefer to simply move on to the next, easier target.

I own a couple of sawzalls, both battery powered and corded and I know full well the ease with which you can cut metal things. So I would be somewhat skeptical that this would completely deter a dedicated meth addict. But it's better than nothing, and especially if one is subject to parking their vehicle overnight in sketchy areas. Dean Lilly said that efforts are underway to have all catalytic converters numbered to allow for id tracing in the event of theft.

While this might slow down the trading of the metal filled parts for cash, the real efforts should be directed at the places where bad guys might take them in the first place. When I visited a local metal recycling yard in Algona and asked to speak to someone about catalytic converter thefts, I was turned away twice with 'the guy you want to talk to isn't here right now.'

A similar thing happened at a local junkyard when I asked to talk to someone about the problem of fencing stolen catcons. Nobody wanted to talk about it. But strictly speaking, there are no laws on the books that I'm aware of that prevent junkyards from buying old car parts. And there are individuals who are advertising on Craigslist to buy 'scrap catalytic converters', paying from between $20 to $350 dollars each.

From Shannon's forwarded email, 'Thank God somebody was going into the pizza place and thought these guys looked like they were up to no good and called the police. A line of tow trucks came up and one by one they were hauling off these peoples cars, I felt so bad for them and so thankful for us that we were one car away from being the next victim.'