Posted on 08/27/2024 9:36:31 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Bike Index now registers the descriptions and serial numbers of about 1.3 million bikes worldwide. But when Hance started the site in 2013, it was a simpler era of theft. Back then, it was mostly a crime of opportunity: Single bikes would disappear from garages or street corners, taken by petty thieves usually wielding nothing more than bolt cutters. Hance’s site allowed police to reunite bikes with their owners if they were found or discarded. And it allowed buyers who cared about such things to do their due diligence to make sure they weren’t buying a stolen bike.
But in spring 2020, Hance was tipped to something new: Scores of high-end bikes that matched the descriptions of bikes reported stolen from locations across the Bay Area were turning up for sale on Facebook Marketplace and Instagram pages attached to someone in Mexico, thousands of miles away.
Hance, an avid cyclist, couldn’t let it stand. From his home in Portland, he set out to crack the case — and in the process, he and others say, exposed disappointing lapses in the reach of U.S. law enforcement and the systems that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has set up to prevent trafficking in stolen goods.
“The guy is still operating,” he said of the bike seller in Mexico he has been watching for so long. “We could do the whole thing again.”
From the moment he began perusing the Mexican bike seller’s listings, Hance believed he was seeing something new and shocking: How were all these bikes, matching descriptions of those stolen from homes in Mountain View and San Jose and Santa Clara, winding up on an online sales platform based near Guadalajara within a few weeks?
He suspected he had stumbled upon an organized multinational ring.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Can’t get past the paywall to read the rest of the article.
The article is secure, the bikes are not
Neverminded the link doesn’t work either.
Most people dont realize a medium grade bike is 4-5 thousand these days.
The problem is a sudden ad comes up asking me to pay for a subscription to the LA Times and blocks the article.
The same with the original link, which did work but wants a subscription paid for to continue.
Interesting. I’d like to do something like that. It would be kind of fun until I get whacked.
Interesting. I’d like to do something like that. It would be kind of fun until I get whacked.
Another example of people seeking justice outside The System, because they cannot find justice within The System.
Or brought up on charges.
My $3K recumbent was stolen right off my truck. Cops found it a few blocks away, evidently the thief couldn’t figure out how to ride it.
There are dozens of videos online of people reporting to the police that their laptop was stolen. The victim would show the police the tracking on it and the police would still do nothing - that is until the enterprising victim would put together a webisode exposing the apathy of the detectives.
I’m not surprised that there’s a cross-border market for bikes. Given their value and cost, I’m surprised that it’s happening in Mexico, and not Europe or Asia. Either way the police have turned a blind eye to this kind of theft, only the most diligent of detectives would even try to track this case. I commend the guy who runs Bike Index for putting in all this work to reconnect riders and their bikes.
Yes, but a Kryptonite U-Bolt bike lock is $110.
I bought one for my 1981 Fuji mountain bike. That bike was almost $500 back then. That bike lock kept it safe in Syracuse for years. You can not cut through that lock with a bolt cutter.
Friends had Fuji's back then, mine was same vintage, around 1980, Motobecane, Remember packing it up to Quebec City with two others in the back of a friend's Saab. Still have the bike.
Their only hope is that the thieves put spicy content on line and get hauled in for hate speech by the police who accidentally stumble upon the stolen watches.
That $4-5,000 I’d for racing bikes.
That is starting to happen with a lot of posts.
The last thing we want is a forced subscription to the LA Slimes or whatever hell hole to read an article.
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