It's small, innocuous, valuable and relatively easy to access.

In short, an opportunistic thief's best friend thanks to a precious metal that is reported to be 15 times more valuable than gold.

Thefts of Catalytic Converters in the province have skyrocketed in the past year, marking a trend that potentially affects not only drivers in Saskatchewan, but everywhere modern cars take to the roads.

A Catalytic Converter is worthless on its own; merely a bubble of aluminum attached to a car's tailpipe designed to filter exhaust fumes. But what is inside of it; a rare earth element known as Rhodium has sparked a large increase in claims to SGI in 2021 regarding missing converters.

According to statistics from Tyler McMurchy, Communications Manager with SGI, the crown corporation has seen 312 claims to SGI so far this year for missing Catalytic Converters, compared to 34 last year and 28 in 2019. He stressed as well that those were only the cases that were claimed, while the real number he suspects may be far higher as a number of car owners replace the part out of their own pocket rather than file a claim.

It's the age-old question of supply and demand, as more countries require ever-higher emission standards, those vehicles will require ever more Rhodium.

But Rhodium does not exist on its own; it's a byproduct of Platinum extraction, which at the moment has been over-mined and has been overstocked on the world market for much of the last decade. With that much platinum in the system, the price for platinum has dropped, leading to fewer mining companies producing it.

No new Platinum means no new Rhodium, causing the small innocuous element to climb to $9,750 American dollars per ounce as of today's numbers, nearly five and a half times more valuable than gold.

So where does that leave Saskatchewan car owners?

Staff Sargeant Evan Gordon with the Swift Current Municipal RCMP says that while the crime is a fast one, there are ways to make one's vehicle less of a target.

"It's a crime of opportunity. Like many other property crimes, if you make yourself a less appealing target, the would-be thief will move on. Parking in well lit and high-traffic areas. visible areas from roadways, business houses, things like that. Parking within view of video surveillance, or having video surveillance on your own property."

He added that there are security devices that can be purchased and installed on the converter itself. Or even at the most extreme, simply welding it into place; anything to make it more time-consuming to grab.

"And we also recommend that if you are concerned, you can have your VIN or another identifying mark engraved on your catalytic converter that way it's a little more obvious to scrap dealers where it belongs and these things can be tracked back and hopefully tracked back to a specific person that is bringing these items in."

In Swift Current, Gordon says that while there has been an increase, it's not to the same degree as other centres, with the majority occurring in Saskatoon and Regina. The city has seen 10 converters stolen in two years in four separate incidents, with three events and 9 converters in the last year.

"To break the numbers down, in one case we saw 6 removed from vehicles in one commercial location. Another event saw 2 at a commercial location, and the third was just a single, but again at a commercial location."

In Swift Current at least, the easiest target is often fleet vehicles or business vehicles that are unattended at night, though Gordon says that residential vehicles can also be targetted as well.