Horrible. Good luck.

my dad and stepmother who live in a fancy west london apartment block were liberated of all their bikes this week too. they have a secure underground garage you need a fob to open and is supposedly cctv monitored by the concierge. inside the garage there are key-coded bike cages, and the bikes were d-locked to cast in bike stands inside them!! so somehow they manged to get in, open the cage, chop up the bike stand with an angle grinder and help themselves to 3 roadbikes and 3 mtb in one go without being noticed!! madness

I feel your pain….. 😥

Terrible news.

I was once told by an ex thief that he would generally only target garages and sheds that have clearly had a lot of effort put in to making them secure, big fancy looking padlocks and bolts as such. As that way he knew there was something in there that someone didn’t won’t to loose.

I’ll see your five and raise you two 🙁 . If your garage has a door to the house, it is a burglary not a theft and deemed much more serious. Our insurance (RSA) was very good and required no receipts, just a few photos. I made a breakdown spreadsheet of every bike with every accessory – right down to replaced inner tubes and bottle cages. This was used for valuation of my beloved and impossible to replace Merlin.

There is no prospect of it happening a second time.

So sorry to hear this, scumbags.

It’s shit. We were done a few weeks ago. No social media gumpf but a few for sale and wanted ads. Arseholes. The bikes live in the house now.

Gutted for you

Did you put your address in the for sale ads? Or did they contact you for it?

Possibly makes it more attractive to the professional thieves. More obviously something to nick.

Anyway, was in a shed/garage I take it. Don’t have to answer that, but bike thieves are more comfortable with such targets as it’s not breaking & entering a residential property. Less risk of coming across people and far less of a crime to the police so even if caught it’s barely a slap on the wrist compared to breaking into a house.

If determined enough though they’ll find a way.

Oh, and most probably know this already, but worth saying again that Strava is actively used to target bikes. Use privacy zones around the house if you ride from home and set them in various spots near the house overlapping, not centred on the house as you can work out the centre of a zone. Also, don’t put the names of your bikes in your bike profile. Easy to search for expensive bikes, see where they are ridden, sit in a car park waiting for them to be loaded or unloaded and nick them while not looking, or follow home. Same goes for bike photos attached to rides. Use enhanced privacy, careful about who you let follow, don’t join Strava clubs. Even then, anything on a leaderboard can be viewed even with privacy on.

Or just don’t use Strava 😉

Huge condolences OP. ): Hopefully everything will be okay with the insurance.

I really can’t comprehend the mindset of someone who would do this. It baffles me.

1. Restore all the visible security
2. Post on social media that you’ve replaced the bikes with new and more expensive ones
3. Put a sign in the (empty) shed saying “suckers”

At least you’ll get a chuckle out of it when they break back in 🙂

My garage was recently broken in to and some items stolen although they failed in getting through the chain holding the bikes. The garage is not attached to my property and is in a separate block. It was classed as burglary and the police did make arrests and recover some items.
The youngest offender got a caution. Another 150 hours of community service, a fine and ordered to pay me compensation. The police are sometimes successful! 🙂