Good observation - my first though when reading this was "wow, didn't know this happens in the US, until now I only heard about things like this from third world countries". I mean, sure, crime happens everywhere, but you have to be pretty desperate to do things like this (relatively high risk of injury or getting caught, relatively low chance of finding something really valuable). Then I realized that unfortunately, despite being one of the richest countries in the world, many US citizens have standards of living comparable to a third world country...
If you genuinely believe that the US has standards comparable to the third world, the you've been consuming propaganda on the Internet, I guess from low-quality communities such as Facebook/Twitter/Reddit etc.
These people aren't "desperate", they are opportunists. The situation is the opposite to what you say: there is low risk of getting caught and high chance of finding something valuable.
