>disguised as thieves stealing fiber optic. This does not have any sense economically, as the value in the market is zero

Do you honestly think that crackheads think that far in advance?

I've seen fiberoptic cables stolen from 2 (city) jobsites in the last 5 years, once by tweakers later caught trying to sell them as scrap copper and the second thief was never caught. This happened even though the spools had big signs on them saying "Fiber Optic Cable - NO COPPER".