YouTube Deep Summary

[Music] foreign a beach in Jamaica was stolen entire truckloads of sand went missing and they never returned but it was not a prank 500 truckloads Gone without a trace it must have been planned Jamaica's mines commissioner at the time suspected that government officials were involved 15 years later the mystery is still unsolved but there are locals that are reporting truckloads that are still running in the night I wanted one of us to go to Jamaica all these years later we just needed to know what happened I'm just gonna [ __ ] camp out with one of those locals and just try to follow these trucks but we couldn't go without help hello hello hey how are you this is Jack do you mind if I just ask you a question right now I've been dying to talk to a local and have you heard of Coral Springs Beach you have anything I don't trust anyone else sorry what people they're feminine people we don't deal with them Criminal yeah just hung up okay there's parts of this story that I wanted to tell differently but for safety reasons I couldn't so I didn't go to Jamaica this video was meant to be about this beach trying to solve the mystery that happened right here but in trying to find the truth we kept pulling on this thread and every corner that we turned revealed something much bigger something that we almost didn't want to admit to ourselves could even be real no sand no modern civilization when the pieces came together one thing was clear it's not just Jamaica around the world sand is going missing we're still going to tell you about what happened at this Jamaican Beach but this story is much much bigger than that okay here's a question where's all the sand going and why would anyone want this much of it in Jamaica in Russia and other places thieves have stolen entire beaches in fact there is a worldwide black market for sand hey how do we feel about thanking our sponsors storyblocks right now storyblocks our sponsor with a curated collection of professional content for licensing yeah that one really good this is the perfect time for it you know they have footage templates music sound effects images and more more and they make new stuff available regularly unlike other sites it's not pay-per-clip it has predictable subscription costs and no hidden fees ever simply how do they make money off of this this is true actually when I was in high school I took a class that got me interested in video like for the very first time my high school teacher had a storyblocks account he let us use for education purposes and it was awesome because I was super scared to go out in public and film stuff and so I was just able to get b-roll of cities and cars and boats and whatever I was making videos on the time that's true that was awesome we weren't able to go to Jamaica so a lot of this footage you had already seen is from storyblocks they license this to us and unlike other stock footage sites they don't get any royalties so I don't have to worry about that going forward and here's something that really about storyblocks they have a creative cloud plugin that is actually super sweet I'm really excited I didn't know about that I'm really excited to use it here's what I'll say I've been doing Motion Graphics for years now and the storyblocks does have tons and tons of Motion Graphics templates on their website if you're here on this channel and you've been enjoying what we're making it might be a good idea if you're considering starting your own channel or looking to grow an existing one Motion Graphics are awesome and they have some for you storyblocks is a subscription service so you pay monthly or yearly and you get access to the new stuff that they put out it's actually really freaking cool there's also a link in the description for this video if you are interested in storyblocks which you should be because if you're not you should be the link is in our description which is storybox.com chuppl we'd super appreciate it thank you to storyblocks for helping us make videos like this and supporting our Channel alright Mia back to the story okay it turns out that there's a global Marketplace for sand to me like At first this didn't sound super interesting but I looked into it and it turns out that this Marketplace hosts criminal organizations mob bosses goons Goons the mob bosses even have goons and it involves corruption at the highest levels of government around the world this Marketplace is even changing International borders I'm not just talking about Jamaica this is a lot bigger than I thought it was at first if you haven't heard about this I promise you you depend on this market and you probably depend on these people too sand is actually the most important solid substance in the world the secrets of these mafias and what happened at that beach are locked away the key to understanding it all is this guy Portugal nice that's empty Canada Western Australia nice okay maybe not him but the game he plays who's ready for it are you ready for this the team and our friends have been spending months trying to get good at this game geoguessr oh it shows you an image from Google Street View shut up you have to try to figure out where you are seriously we've been studying dude birch trees I know that foliage anyway Finland these telephone poles okay word Senegal this car under you [Music] weird Birds Midway at all the weird birds are my favorite but there's one part of the world that's notoriously difficult to learn oh man okay dude Morgan to our naive American eyes we can't tell this from this but in the region there's a black sheep no question oh bro I'm dropping right now okay let me find the street name sorry beet road is over there that is weird why is Beach Road so Inland Singapore is fighting a war with the ocean and winning its secret weapon is Sand Beach Road used to be on the water this land used to belong to the ocean and now it's Singapore's well [ __ ] there's a rabbit hole Singapore is a tiny country it used all of its own sand really fast so they had to go find sand somewhere else I'm thinking maybe that's where the Jamaican sand went without sand civilization as it could not exist [Music] what MIA you can't just drop the [ __ ] on me okay I'm on it okay Dubai is out of Sam too they buy it from Australia yeah where'd you get that fact the Poo store stop no Mia they have a desert desert sand sucks I like it that doesn't matter can we just use the desert there's a lot of signs to this I like it you might not I'm gonna try to speed through it I can give you the Bare Bones please desert sand good for nothing that is not the sand that we're talking about ocean sand land reclamation River and beach sand that's the good stuff a specific material derived from Sand silicon dioxide is used in like almost everything red 40. check my red dye 40. I need to cover your face it's oh it's harder for you to look at me okay all right computers phones credit cards wine wine yes [Music] what no that's that's crazy that's nuts yeah I could go on this one guy who's Ted Talk I listened to was really into telling people that sand was in their underwear I just love telling people that they have sand in their underwear oh my God no seriously though we depend on it and it's not just Dubai and Singapore that are running out we all are the whole world the whole world sand is being used quicker than it can be replenished sand is the most commonly used non-renewable resource second only to water more than oil sand the Jamaican sand was from a beach what's this good stuff used for so the vast majority of mine sand goes to Construction [Music] is roughly 70 sand and gravel it's called aggregate no [ __ ] that's crazy and Global demand for sand is going to keep going up foreign so what happens when we run out run out eighty percent of everything that is built today in the world is made of concrete it's a literal Foundation of modern civilization look at this graph it shows the change in urban population around the world it takes a lot of construction to keep up with this yes the world is running out of sand but it's not all because of sand theft every year the world uses 50 billion tons of aggregate that's enough to cover the entire United Kingdom or simply using too much all the while more and more people flock to cities and sea levels rise much of the sand trade is legal but according to the UN it's completely lacking in regulation anyways here's what we know the stolen Beach wasn't a tourist spot it was primarily locals these locals say that sand theft happens frequently just not this much of it it was so shocking that Ripley's Believe it or not even mentioned it in a cartoon this theft happened overnight and it wasn't a small operation using excavators and trucks the sand was worth about 1 million dollars which leaves the question where do you hide hundreds of tons of sand the Queen of England was also curious Jamaica used to be part of the British Empire there's still some like remnants of that that are alive and well today and one of those things is that the British crown had the authority to open an investigation into this stolen sand case so she did the queen of England to understand what happens next in this investigation you have to know how these mafias operate the strategies that they use and just how high up the conspiracy can go 500 truckloads of sand did a lot but to Singapore it's just a speck they don't need it and so they didn't steal this Jamaican Beach instead they went to their neighbors Singapore took so much sand from its Southeast Asian neighbors that they were all hit really hard okay Indonesia even started losing some of their entire Islands it sounds bad but it actually gets a lot worse and it's because if a country loses an island they may not have the same claim to that Maritime border and if you know anything about the South China Sea it's definitely not the place that you want to be losing Island facing trips and so in response One By One The Singapore's neighbors started Banning sand exports to this now prosperous island nation officially leaving a 60 billion dollar industry in the most sand hungry part of the world when the U.S banned alcohol that worked right Jack so sand Mafia started to thrive and today they're all around the world India Morocco Indonesia and yes Jamaica to get to the bottom of these criminal organizations we reached out to a cyber security and open source intelligence expert they asked to remain anonymous they created what's called a crawler to try to find out where these groups are selling their sand we were absolutely sure that the sand trades home base was the dark web the results really surprised us [Music] nothing nothing I thought that if we could figure out where this stand is sold and the ins and outs of how they do it that it would lead us back to that Jamaican Beach so we hit that dead end and paji and I turned our heads to India where the sand Mafia isn't just prominent it's actually the most powerful criminal ring in the whole country do I also record no okay hey there this is paji you'll meet him in the next video my name is I'm from India from an organization called South Asia Network condense rivers and people just like many other parts of the world India's sand economy has many companies that are mining and selling sand completely legally above board entirely but it's definitely not all of them so there are a lot of small described a lot of other players who will be mining at the local level and they'll be acting like a mafia in that particular mining operation and they will do it some mostly with the Collision of their officials who are supposed to be policing uh monitoring that operation remember when Jamaica's mines commissioner suspected that government officials helped steal the beach what makes it so rampant you know happening everywhere is because they have a political uh sort of protection and politicians local ruling politicians are involved they actually see this activity as a major money generating activity for their own election processes with political protection they have no reason to hide the mining itself happens in the rivers of the largest cities in the country in broad daylight practically all over the India this is going on it particularly happens close to the urban areas big cities because the cities are Major Market for send I thought that our cyber security expert was going to be able to find this like vast hidden network of global sand trade and now we know why they didn't yeah not hidden not at all like at all it's there for everyone to see [Music] yes most people will not make a distinction so if I am doing something repairing my house or you know building a small house I have to buy a sand I will not be bothered where it is coming from or whether it's coming illegally or illegally ultimately I don't even know where it comes from and who is mining that sand where it is mined and how it is legal or illegal you know you can't looking at this end you can't say whether it's legally mind or illegally mind because it's all books same there's just no way for us to confirm if all these listings are companies selling sand legally or group selling it illegally but when you see sand being sold from a country that has laws Banning it it's worth noting [Music] compare like the sand mafias to the coal mafias or the drug mafias are any of them disproportionately targeting journalists yes definitely sand mining is definitely disproportionately High uh that there's no doubt about it I mean we definitely can't say that's the same in India as it is in Jamaica but there is more to the story of that Jamaican Beach and it does raise an eyebrow that it was hardly reported on so here it is the beach that was stolen was actually on land that was bought for the purpose of turning into a resort while the plans were being made is when the beach was stolen while the British crown opened their criminal investigation evidence was found that led to two other hotel resorts on the island mixed into their brown sand was lots and lots of powdery white sand the type found on the stolen Beach these Hotel operators claimed they hired an aggregate Mining Company to bring sand to their beaches for tourism purposes if the sand was taken from Coral Springs the hotel operators claimed they were unaware but the owner of the stolen Beach alleged that the hotel operators hired this company as an agent for exactly that purpose so in tandem with the criminal investigation the beach owner commissioned an environmental study of the sand at the hotels to see if it was a match but the accused Resorts had employees raking the sand in the middle of the night that made it really complicated to discern the investigation went on for years all leading up to a very suspicious climax a climax that shocked the head of the British investigation he said it was clearly quite a conspiracy some of the people that would be involved in this could be quite influential the lead witness started getting really credible threats like intense ones and as a result of this they actually dropped out they said I'm not testifying anymore and so with hardly any evidence to go off of the case was dropped so while this case might be officially unsolved it's important to note what locals have reported on the bigger story here is these sand mafias all of them in comparison this Jamaican Beach feels like nothing [Music] we scraped a bunch of old newspapers to try to see how many cases of sand theft we could find here in the U.S we found that frequently its companies doing the mining often breaking laws and Mining where they shouldn't time after time they just get a slap on the wrist like this case in Hawaii where a concrete production company was caught illegally removing and transporting sand the U.S Corps of Engineers even obtained photo evidence of the company doing so but they promised it would never happen again case dropped but it did happen again the U.S Corps of Engineers obtained video evidence of the continuing theft and three years later an activist group wanted charges for the continued crime but the judge communicated to the group's attorney that quote he would cite contempt of court charges against anyone who attempted to approach the grand jury on the matter sand has always been used as a metaphor for things like how many stars are in the universe or Infinity but we're at a humbling turning point something we depend on so actively is running out and admittedly it's hard to comprehend historically when sand mining or exporting is regulated criminal groups jump in and Thrive this Jamaican Beach is just a symptom of a much larger picture at the core of the Dilemma is now that this can't be ignored how are governments who are one of if not the biggest buyers of sand going to respond there's lots of hope there's small glimmers of it and Alternatives may be on the horizon but for now let's call it what it is another dangerous dependency on an Ever depleting resource [Music] everything everywhere whether it was from the government officials from the ministry of environment from the research organizations from journalists One Voice one very clear message that came through is that the only way you can really regulate effectively send business the same mining itself is that if the local people local communities who stay close to the river who depend on the river have a right have a role in monitoring and achieving compliance even sanctioning if they are empowered that into have that through legally enforceable Provisions then it's possible that one can achieve a sort of semblance of more regulated sand mining business the standable development is development that needs compromising the ability of huge generations to meet their own needs