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They're all tagged with GPS trackers these days. The rare case of heavy equipment like that being stolen almost always results in recovery because of that. I would recommend just trying to steal some parts of the machine, rather than the whole thing. If you do enough research and presell the parts before taking them you would probably get away with it for a while.

Thought exercise only, I ain't cut out for the life of crime.

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Hydraulic cylinders would probably be a good place to start, just based on anecdata from seeing equipment down for long, expensive periods of time as cylinders go off for rebuild/reseal/resleeving.

What thieves seem to go for nowdays is the d-gps hardware installed in graders / excavators used in large projects. Very expensive stuff which is easy to hide. A Leica 3d kit is something like $40k...

I've heard the same[1], but that kind of thing seems trivially easy to track down, no?

[1]In fact I was involved on a project where some thieves took a sawzall to the equipment storage conex over the weekend and stole every bit of GPS equipment they could get their hands on. They were pretty quickly tracked down when they tried to offload it though.

Could sell it outside of the country? It does make me wonder.

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