What your describing is the status quo, if that solution worked we would see a decline in thefts. My solution would threaten the business licenses of shady operators.
We need to make certain things illegal for recycling yards to accept from the public. Like catalytic converters industrial wire some building materials. If we put the onus on the recycling business we might get better results than we are currently experiencing.
Just keep Jon's original post, hide everything else, and close the thread. Repeat this everywhere a non-technical post doesn’t conform. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.