I stopped at Best Buy here in town one day and they had this huge 18 wheeler trailer setup outside with huge flex ducts running onto the roof. I asked one of the employees what was going on and they said that someone stole the huge commercial HVAC units off the roof of the store so they had to use the portable system!
It got so bad a couple of years ago around here with theft on new home jobsites that I actually framed up the house, installed the exterior OSB, windows and doors, and had my low voltage guys install an alarm system. This was all before any of the other wiring, insulation, or drywall was done! Then we stored all of our exterior siding and trim on a shallow porch roof to mike it hard to get to.
Then my foreman made up what appeared to be a pile of plywood and covered it with a lumber wrap. We came back after a weekend and the lumber wrap was removed and the junk under the wrap was scattered all over the place! They did not steal anything but I bet they were surprised when the dug into the fake plywood pile thinking they were going to score some $16 per sheet (yeah, that is what is was going for then!) OSB!
My dad has a commercial business park with a number of metal warehouse type buildings. He had a couple of units ripped off from ground level so we went in and took the covers off and screwed them down to the concrete pad with Tapcon concrete screws. That stopped that too! He had one where they cut the copper lines and the wire but did not steal it since it was not easy to load and they did not want to fool around with taking it all apart.
