Quebec trucking company offers $50K reward after precious metals stolen overnight

A trucking company in Joliette, Que., is offering a $50 K reward for locating a trailer full of aluminum.

A trucking company based in Joliette, Que., is offering a $50,000 reward to anyone who can help them recover a trailer carrying a valuable load of aluminum that was stolen last weekend.

The thieves allegedly broke into the yard of a truck terminal that belonged to Express Mondor, which specializes in oversized loads. It happened at around 4:30 a.m. Sunday in Delson, on Montreal’s South Shore.

The thieves allegedly broke into several trailers and quickly found the one carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of aluminum in the form of billets that are used as raw materials in various industries.

The GPS tracker was disabled and disposed of in the yard by the thieves and while the missing truck was found later that day in Boucherville, the trailer and its merchandise have disappeared.

“They were very organized, and they knew what they were doing,” Express Mondor’s vice-president of finance, John Constanzo, told CTV News.

The company says it’s offering the $50,000 reward because theft of metals has significantly increased in recent years in the shipping industry and elsewhere.

“It’s been around for a while. It’s been a problem in the industry, especially since the price of those metals have skyrocketed in the past years” Costanzo said.

“They’re aluminum billets, and they are sold to scrap metal yards and then they are transformed in order to lose all identification, and then they’re sold at large.”

Costanzo says the company has been working with police and they’re analyzing tips, though no concrete information has come to light for now.