It doesn’t take long; A quick slide under a car and moments later the thief emerges with a  converters unlimited stolen for the precious metals inside.

“You just hear every day or every week somebody in my neighborhood is getting their  stolen,” said Scott Cook, who lives in Tempe, Arizon

Thieves cut the converters out of the car’s exhaust systems, then sell them to scrappers. They are then resold to recycling companies.

The thieves get as little as $50, but the metals inside include rhodium, which is the rarest metal on earth.

There’s only a gram or two of rhodium inside, but an ounce of the silvery metal can top $15,000.

“Certain electric cars that have a high efficiency and high amount of rhodium,” said Chicago Police Superintendent David O. Brown.

Rhodium is used in  converters unlimited with palladium and platinum to reduce exhaust gases, but as the rarest metal in the world, it’s also valued for jewelry, high-end mirrors and electrical devices.

In Tampa, police busted one recycler last year who advertised on social media he was paying cash for converters.

“It showed that he had made well over $800,000 in about a year’s time just with the receipts we found in the home,” Tampa Police Department Officer Greg Noble said.

Bloomberg reports in 2021, State Farm Insurance paid $62 million in claims for around 32,000 converter thefts. That’s up over 1,100% from two years earlier.

“I started my car and it sounded like a race car,” West Palm Beach, Florida, theft victim Pamela Beady said.

That was her first clue that something wasn’t right.

“There was metal pieces laying under the ground underneath,” she continued.