A woman wearing blue overalls and a pink tank top sits on a bench in a workshop lined with tools. Holding a broken copper wire in one hand and a small mechanical tool in the other, she looks at the camera and smiles. “Let’s make money stripping …” she says, pausing for effect. “Wire!”
This play on words is common in a specific corner of TikTok where users document the process of stripping copper wire in order to sell it for extra cash. Most of these creators don't appear to collaborate or use a common hashtag, and they haven’t coined a new term ending in -maxxing. But many of their videos have a similar, visually striking setup: A complex appliance is broken down into bits, or an industrial wire is split like ropes of licorice, and in the end, what’s left is a bundle of glistening amber.
The participants are diverse: Some are hobbyists or electricians looking for extra income. There are also people who claim to be saving for a big purchase, and others who appear to be cash-strapped teenagers. They speak a wide range of languages, including English, French, Spanish, German, and Romanian. At least one has an Etsy shop for selling hand-cast copper bricks, also known as ingots, which are made by pouring molten metal into molds.
Selling scrap copper is nothing new. The metal is relatively scarce, a strong electrical conductor, and fully recyclable—qualities that have made it a particularly valuable scrap metal for centuries. But copper prices reached an all-time high this year, making it an opportune moment for scrappers. In September, according to International Monetary Fund data, copper was worth about $14,473 per metric ton, or about $7.23 per pound, more than double what it was worth in September 2020.
While there’s no reliable data on how often people sell scrap copper, rates of copper theft—often involving metal taken from vehicles, plumbing, building roofs—may offer some clues. Craig Depken II, chair and professor of economics at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, who has studied the phenomenon, says it tends to increase under two conditions.
The first is when the price of copper is increasing, much like it is now. The second is when people’s level of “economic distress” is high enough to make them believe the potential monetary benefits of stealing copper outweigh the risks of getting caught. (It’s legal to sell lawfully obtained copper everywhere in the US except Minnesota, which requires a state-issued license.)
On TikTok, it’s easy to find copper-themed accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers. On TikTok Shop, beginners can even buy their own wire stripper—the small tool that eats a cord and separates copper from its exoskeleton. The most popular option has sold more than 20,000 units globally at the time of writing.
Wire Transfers
The final price of recycled copper depends on a few factors, including its quality, grade, and whether it’s still “insulated” in plastic or rubber. Insulated copper can go for a fraction of the price of stripped copper, so many resellers remove it themselves to earn more. But even with a wire stripper, the process can be tedious. For some, sharing content about it appears to be a way to make the repetitive task more bearable.
People have posted about hosting a wire-stripping “girls night,” “movie night” and even “date night.” In one video from August, the creator @Payciencu.u strips wire on a bed near a man in a red sweatshirt. “How down bad are you?” reads the text overlay. “Well I’m stripping wire just to hang out with him sooo.”
Other creators treat copper scrapping as a full-on side hustle or hobby, posting time-lapses, tutorials, and lists of the “worst cables to strip for copper.”
Benjamin Stickle, a criminal justice professor at Middle Tennessee State University and author of the 2017 book Metal Scrappers and Thieves, identified three main types of legal scrappers: those trying to make ends meet, workers selling scrap metal they obtained on the job, and people raising money for a charitable cause.
Electricians, who are plentiful among wire-stripping TikTokkers, neatly fall into the worker category. Other creators are harder to classify, especially if they’re also earning money from TikTok itself.
The creator @Courtney2291, who did not respond to WIRED's inquiries, began documenting her efforts to strip enough copper to save $20,000 for a three-bedroom home earlier this year. She sourced wire and old machinery from family, her scrap yard, and Facebook Marketplace, stripping it almost daily. On October 10, a little over six months after she started, she announced she had reached her fundraising goal.
However, most of the money didn’t come from selling the copper itself. According to a scrap yard receipt Courtney shared, she earned just $99 selling 30 pounds of copper stripped over six months. One TikTok video, meanwhile, generated $1,446 after racking up 6.8 million views, according to an earnings screenshot she displayed in another video.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Courtney says she plans to keep posting. “Once the house is mine, and it’s all set up and ready to be lived in, then I’ll continue pretty much the same kind of content,” she said. Her new goal will be to pay off the loan on the two acres of land where her home will sit.
Strip Tease
Other popular copper creators, including King of Copper and Queen of Copper take a different approach, emphasizing scale and spectacle over personal storytelling. Their videos show them buying crates and trunks with hundreds of pounds of old wire, and then, little by little, stripping every piece
Neither claims to be affiliated with the other, despite their similar names and videos, but they occasionally repost each other's content. Both have amassed hundreds of thousands of followers, though how much they earn from TikTok and YouTube is unclear.
King of Copper is currently more than 70 days into a self-described quest to obtain, strip, and sell 1 ton of copper. In early September, 44 days into his journey, he claimed to have collected 271 pounds.
In one recent video, King of Copper spent five hours stripping wire, melting the copper in a black furnace, and then pouring it into six-ingot molds, producing what he claimed was about $90 worth of metal. In another clip, he spent two hours meticulously dismantling a 110-pound air conditioner and extracted roughly 7 pounds of copper, which he valued at $47.
His videos are mesmerizing to watch, but it’s unknown how much he might earn from them, and King of Copper did not respond to inquiries from WIRED.
Strip Mall
Another way copper accounts can earn revenue is by marketing wire strippers and other goods for sale on TikTok Shop. When viewers purchase products through links in their videos, creators can earn a commission on each sale. Courtney, for instance, has advertised her own wire stripper. But many of these salespeople, like the creator @Dragonslayer_Industries, don’t speak much about copper outside of their ads.
“If you’ve got any scrap wire laying around, you need this wire stripper right here,” Dragonslayer Industries says in a January video before feeding a bright green wire through a machine linked for purchase. “This thing is basically just gonna print money for you. Probably pay for itself in the first hour you use it.”
“It's crazy, I only got this because my neighbor was stripping wire by hand,” he said in a June comment on one of his videos. “I got the free sample and thought l'd do 2 videos and give it to him. I thought it was such a niche thing that they probably wouldn't sell. It's been my biggest seller since l started doing affiliate videos. I can count on 5-10 of these a day selling.”
In May, he claimed to have helped sell thousands of wire strippers. It’s unclear how much he’s earned, since TikTok Shop merchants set their own affiliate commission rates. Dragonslayer Industries did not respond to WIRED's inquiries, but in a recent video he noted that it's not in his “best interest” to devote much time to wire stripping since he makes “more money” from doing other things.
But human salespeople like him face plenty of competition from AI-generated ads on TikTok Shop. Even in the specialized market for wire strippers, there’s a huge number of videos featuring AI-generated imagery and voice-overs, some using remarkably similar scripts about making “eight grand a week” from selling scrap copper.
Online, copper scrapping can seem like a solitary pursuit. Offline, however, scrappers sometimes form the kinds of communities that are less apparent on TikTok. Stickle tells WIRED that scrappers he spoke to often worked in small teams, split their profits, and looked out for one another. People struggling to get by, especially those who were experiencing homelessness, sometimes received donated metal from their fellow scrappers.
Stickle adds that they also would lean on friends who had trucks for help transporting large hauls. “If they came across a large amount [of metal] that they couldn't just dolly back to a place,” Stickle says, “they had somebody they'd call.”