Viewing 40 posts - 1 through 40 (of 49 total)
  • (stolen bikes) Where do they go?
  • z1ppy
    Full Member

    Seem to be loads of high profile thefts of late, for what are very distinctive bike (in some cases). That and some of the thefts (bike shops, trade shows) must have taken reasonable amount of planning (you’d hope) & time scouting these places, so they must be quite organised?
    Obviously most of the parts can be shifted easily enough, on places like ebay or even the STW classifieds without much worry of being caught but what about the frames?
    Is that enough of a return for the bike thief’s, it’s a hassle to strip & sell indiviually & a fair chance of being traced back.

    .
    I know that cars are shifted out of the country, even stolen to order, but is there a market for MTB’s like that?
    Or are they just stored in a shed and sold in 6/12 months?
    Even if they were just sold to the drug dealer/fense they’d turn up some-where & be seen/found wouldn’t they?

    I’m think of stuff like the very distinctive Maverick (IIRC) stolen from STW a few years back, never seen of again, not even a whisper

    WFT happens to all these bikes? Any theory’s?

    Hairychested
    Free Member

    My Specialized SX lives in the same land as the other stolen bikes. I wish I knew where it was.

    psychle
    Free Member

    parts get stripped and sold on, frames probably sit in storage forever or get dumped, maybe taken overseas perhaps? Wouldn’t bother the tealeafs if they just made money on the parts, it’s still a decent profit given they paid nothing for it in the first place, cocks… 😡

    klunky
    Free Member

    Broken down and parts swapped. I often see bikes such as a fuel ex 9 frame built up with wheels from an asda bike and boxxers etc. being ridden by pikey kids.

    robinbetts
    Free Member

    Wouldn’t be surprised if they’re sold for a fraction of their value to people who don’t know what they have and don’t really ride, and therefore they never really show up in circles that recognise them.

    I bet you’re right about some of them being shashed for a while before resale, but I wouldn’t think there was the same steal to order as with cars, as you’d then be selling them on to people in the know, and they’d be spotted.

    crazy-legs
    Full Member

    There was a depressing article in the Guardian recently where they interviewed some former crack head bike thief (now reformed) who said how he nicked stuff – didn’t have to be particularly high end but he was saying he’d sell it on within a few hours to one of a group of about 5-6 contacts sometimes for as little as £30, just enough to buy his next hit. Once the drugs wore off he’d be out on the streets again looking for easy pickings.

    The contacts usually sold the bike on again for a bit more to people who knew full well they were buying stolen goods but wanted a bargain.

    There was quite a chain involved – middle ranking stuff, the £300-£600 stuff is easy to sell on complete cos they’re so common, higher end stuff usually ends up being stripped, parts swapped over etc.

    The article was very revealing but ultimately really sad that people had got themselves into this spiral of decline and depressing to see that the police didn’t really care yet the impact on the bike owner when they come back and find their pride and joy gone was huge. 🙁

    FOG
    Full Member

    When I used to race off road M/cycles this was always a big problem. Some tealeafs are professionals and steal to strip, knowing exactly what stuff is worth but others are know-nothing scrotes who do it because they can.
    So you could see some 14yr old asbo king riding a £5000 enduro bike round the swings in his local shooting gallery oh I mean park.
    I just hope the police take it a bit more seriously than they did M/C theft. A copper I used to know said they hardly bothered with car theft let alone bike disappearing

    brant
    Free Member

    The Lapierre Pendbox DH bike that was nicked from Hotlines was spotted at Stockwell Tube station last weekend. Bloke just riding it around.

    If anyone sees owt.. give us (or the police) a shout eh? They’re out there.

    GHill
    Full Member

    A friend of a friend bought a nearly new Orange 5 for £50 in a pub on a “don’t ask, won’t tell” basis. I suspect a lot of bikes disappear that way.

    Surprised the rare stuff doesn’t get spotted though.

    thisisnotaspoon
    Free Member

    At the end of the day its probably as much effort for the police to go after 1 drug dealer as it is one coked up bike thief. So even if you think nothing was done when your bike was nicked, they might be preventing many more!

    crazy-legs
    Full Member

    If anyone sees owt.. give us (or the police) a shout eh? They’re out there.

    Or mug them for it. I’ve done that twice now to recover stolen property. 🙂

    toys19
    Free Member

    psychle – Member

    parts get stripped and sold on, frames probably sit in storage forever or get dumped, maybe taken overseas perhaps? Wouldn’t bother the tealeafs if they just made money on the parts, it’s still a decent profit given they paid nothing for it in the first place, cocks…

    It’s not like me to disagree with anyone on here ;D but I think this is just an urban myth. I reckon the vast majority who nick them have precious little idea about bikes they are just scrotes who will nick anything for a few quid.

    Elfinsafety
    Free Member

    I’ve said this before a few times on here; I’ve no doubt that at least some of the bikes are fenced by ‘proper’ mtbers; you’d trust a person who’s really into their biking and has themselves nice bikes, over some scrote, wouldn’t you?

    I’d reckon there’s a chunky percentage of nicked parts goes through classifieds on here even. Easy place to shift stuff, eager buyers looking for bargains, thousands of forum members browsing the site etc. Perfect to shift components. The worst thing is, that some of the biggest fences might even be well-liked and trusted regulars.

    I think it’s foolish and naive to imagine it can only be scrotey kids off council estates/drug addicts. Sure, they’re nicking loads of bikes, but when we start to talk about high-end stuff, seems to me that it’s far better coordinated and people are specifically targeted. Thieves know what they’re looking for. How do they know this?

    Sad to say, but it’s possible that one or two people you’ve ridden with, are on the scout for particular things. Face it, if you’re a bike thief, it’s a bloody good way of finding out where people live, what their security arrangements are, etc. Even when they’re likely to be at home, etc.

    And let’s not kid ourselves; whilst most of us hopefully wouldn’t knowingly buy stolen goods, a lot of people, when faced with an absolute killer bargain, might ignore the possibility it might be hot. What people say publicly, and how they act privately, are often two completely different things…

    Scrotes and addicts tend to go for easy targets, and are just looking for a quick sale. They’re not organised enough to go for the top-end stuff. That’s being co-ordinated by people with ‘inside information’.

    Trust no-one. Suspect everyone.

    crazy-legs
    Full Member

    Elfin is probably fairly close to the mark actually – I used to work with a mechanic who turned up with new stuff on his bike regularly. Some of it was legit but we began finding stock discrepancies that matched the new parts on his bike. It came to a head when he turned up one day with brand new XTR V brakes on his bike and we ran a stock check on our XTR stock – sure enough we were one set of V brakes short.

    On asking him about them (all innocent like) he claimed to have found them in the gutter while riding home! We confronted him with the evidence and in the end he admitted it, he was made to take them off the bike and then he was fired.

    Turned out on further investigation that he’d been doing that at other places he’d worked for too but back then we didn’t really have “HR” or ask for references etc, he was just a student who was good at fixing bikes so we employed him and obviously other shops had been taken in by him too.

    U31
    Free Member

    I know for sure one of the bikes i have bought was nicked… 😆

    Elfinsafety
    Free Member

    Plus, there’s different forms of bike theft.

    Opportunist street theft, cutting locks etc. Probbly the biggest single form of bike theft.
    Burglary (breaking in to nick other stuff, taking a bike just because it’s there; provides a quick getaway)
    Targeted burglary (breaking into garages cutting ground anchor chains etc)
    Robbery.

    The last one is on the increase where I live; many cyclists have to travel through scrote-infested areas on their journeys to and from Canary Wharf/the City etc. The scrotes lie in wait, in large groups, then jump someone coming past on a nice bike. A very worrying trend. I’ve had little scumbaygs try it on with me; they don’t initially realise I am also scum, and get a bit of a shock when I open my foul and caustic gob. Women are often the victims of this form of cowardly attack.

    And don’t underestimate the power of scrotes to identify decent bikes and parts. They go and do community cycle maintenance courses, so they can learn to strip the bikes down…

    U31
    Free Member

    The last one is on the increase where I live; many cyclists have to travel through scrote-infested areas on their journeys to and from Canary Wharf/the City etc. The scrotes lie in wait, in large groups, then jump someone coming past on a nice bike. A very worrying trend. I’ve had little scumbaygs try it on with me; they don’t initially realise I am also scum, and get a bit of a shock when I open my foul and caustic gob. Women are often the victims of this form of cowardly attack.

    This was happening during the School hols around Salford, Scrotes waiting in a country park targeting kids on good bikes

    U31
    Free Member

    Aww, no bites?
    The frame came from a police recovered property auction in Longridge.
    I had to buy (iir) 5 bikes in the lot

    piha
    Free Member

    I think that the article highlighted by “crazy legs” pretty much hits the nail on the head.
    Through work I have unfortunately met several people that are quite happy to buy a “£2000 bike for £80 from a lad down the pub”. The £80 would give the said lads a decent night out for about 1 hours work. The bikes would have the serial numbers ground off with a disc cutter and given a quick respray with a can of paint stolen from the local Halfords, all a bit to easy for them.
    The people stealing the bikes know plenty about bikes, a top bike gets them a better price and the people buying the bikes know about the bikes they are buying. The buyers simply don’t see buying a nicked bike as a crime and as I was told, if someone can afford a £2ooo+ bike then they can afford to have it insured, so they can claim on their insurance and buy a new bike and therefore they don’t really lose out.
    If people were not prepared to buy stolen bikes and there is a massive market for nicked bikes then I doubt there would be as many bikes stolen as there appears to be. It used to be a similar situation for car stereo’s a fair few years back but then car manufactures started producing stereo’s that were not interchangeable with other cars and harder to steal, so people were less inclined to steal them. IMHO 🙂

    chunkypaul
    Free Member

    +1 as crazylegs says, my £3k bike was sold for £300 to someone who then tried to e-bay it for £1,500

    police told me he bought off three scrotes likely to be the ones who burgled my house – so thats £100 each for drugs for a day for them

    Frankenstein
    Free Member

    Some basket will buy it.

    Murvis
    Free Member

    My friend had a top of the range track bike stolen recently. Was reported when someone went to see a bike advertised on Gumbtree and it wasn’t the one advertised. The Police said they would send an officer with him to get it but backed out twice because they couldn’t spare an anyone. Now the bike is gone. Nothing done about it, though they know where it was.

    …I was stopped and lectured for a good 10-15 minutes by an officer the other day (same area) for rolling mounted across an emtpy pavement to a bike rack, because it is ‘illegal and dangerous to cycle on the pavement’.
    Strange priorities. 😐

    bruneep
    Full Member

    Even if they were just sold to the drug dealer/fense they’d turn up some-where & be seen/found wouldn’t they?

    My DH bike stolen from Aberdeen a year ago was recovered by the police in Merseyside last month.

    luked2
    Free Member

    FWIW, Cambridgeshire Constabulary have recently rounded up some huge number of bike thieves. They had some kind of elaborate sting operation going for a year.

    “So far, 62 people have been arrested by the Operation Northwood team, and 52 charged.”

    http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Home/Man-who-sold-stolen-bikes-jailed.htm

    Murvis
    Free Member

    Nice one.

    Let’s hope they are planning more elsewhere.

    martymac
    Full Member

    my bike was stolen in 1997, didnt see it for 6 months, then my wife spotted it outside a shop in the next town.
    she noticed the handlebars, which were risers, (still a relatively new thing, back then)
    they were blue anodised, they had been the only pair in the shop.
    she phoned the rozzers, they arrived quickly, and i got it back in about 3 days after they had done the paperwork.
    the f@cker who had it didnt get charged though, as they couldnt prove he had nicked it.
    none of the coppers i spoke to had ever heard of anyone getting a bike back.

    vdubber67
    Free Member

    he claimed to have found them in the gutter while riding home!

    Quite probably the worst excuse for anything, ever, in the entire history of everything. Brilliant! 😆

    thomthumb
    Free Member

    an acquaintance of a friend of mine would get bikes to order. we are talking £50-£100 whatever bike you wanted! quite a few of the guys there had bikes from him. it was never said they were stolen but it was pretty clear that’s what was meant.

    unfortunately i never got enough details to shop him.

    jfletch
    Free Member

    My first “proper” bike got nicked from outside a shop when I was 16, a fair few years back. Found the frame dumped in some bushes a few weeks later. Little sh1ts had stripped the frame but left the crank set, probably the most expensive single part on the frame. Thieving ****ts obviously didn’t have the nouse to rob a crank extractor.

    palliative.stare
    Free Member

    I worked with quite a few drug users who nick bikes, as had been mentioned, most were just the bottom of the chain so would sell them on for anything from £20 – £150 as they just need the money. One lad who knew what he was was looking for in a bike, grabbed a carbon scott fs with full xtr and let it go for £100 as he was just desperate for the cash for the drugs. He was genuinely quite aggreived that the guy he sold it to kept the price low as he could see he was on the rattle, I did point out the chap he stole it off may also be a bit less than happy, but the conversation didn’t get that far after that.

    brakes
    Free Member

    Places bikes end up:
    – ridden round by pikey kids
    – stripped and sold eBay, Gumtree, classifieds etc.
    – Brick Lane market
    – the canal
    – stuck in a lorry and taken to Eastern Europe
    – with the Police, in a lockup somewhere, unclaimed and untraceable

    B.A.Nana
    Free Member

    Many people are just naive or complacent. There have been many occasions when I’ve thought I could follow a car home with flash bike(s) on display on the roof or rack.

    Driving home with your fancy bike on car roof bike bars or a bike rack is not a good idea. Even just leaving roof bike bars on your car just advertises the fact you have nice bikes in your house or garage. I’m also sure, even some people just out riding their bikes are followed home and targeted.

    With regards bike shops/manufacturers, locally we had a number of bike shops/manufacturers robbed within a short space of time, one bike shop was next door to my shop, my shop being full of booze and very easy to rob, with little security, my shop was not touched. So, why are a few expensive bikes more desirable?. My reasoning!….You can’t sell booze on ebay, gumtree etc, but you can easily sell bike parts?.

    hainman
    Free Member

    i have a friend who took out her 10yr old apollo from her garage and left it at her front step while she nipped into her house to grab something.she lives in a culdi-sac off the main straight so not easy to see a bike lying at a front door but still got pinched and she was left with a clapped out bmx,later that day she is out and about only to see her bike being rode by some wee ned so she jumps out and confronts him screaming “thats my bike you little f***er”he sh*t himself and gave it back(even helped her put it in the boot)now the cops say they can get finger prints from the frame coz the wee bawbag was so kind to help put the bike in her boot,NABBED!!!!

    JustGoRide
    Free Member

    In my experience they never go far. I’ve had three bikes nicked and all three have turn up within 5 miles of where they were nicked. The last of which was stolen in 2007 and turned up on eBay earlier this year – 2 years on!!! The police bent over backwards to help me recover it! The more organised thieves are hitting places like the Hotlines show, or the Orange factory etc.. I reckon most of the other bikes will be closer then you think, but will hardly ever see the light of day again!

    scaredypants
    Full Member

    I agree, ultimately people like us are probably driving this, at least in part. We’re the end market for shifting this stuff, knowingly or not.

    What if the police did spot checks at trail centres, stations etc? If your frame number is on a nicked database (course, we’d have to sort a proper one of those), it’s forcibly taken from you, on the spot and you can come to the station/warehouse to retrieve your parts within 7days of seizure (or lose them too). I’d support that.

    Granted, parts alone would still be impossible to trace but it might make thieves’ lives a bit harder.

    It would be time-efficient for a copper or three with a van to spend a day at, say, Afan or a big station rather than chasing up single thefts for maybe an hour each time. High-profile too.

    If you ride a bike with a ground-off s/n, maybe they could just give you a kicking instead, as there’d be no proof of theft 😆

    Even, ebay etc (and stw) could help by insisting that frame numbers be stated in ads

    woody74
    Full Member

    I have been to police auctions a number of times and always surprised by the number of quality bikes that obviously haven’t either been marked or recorded stolen as the police cant find the owner so sell the bike on. How many of you out there have your bikes on Immobilise website and have a tracker fitted. To be fair I think cyclists are their own worst enemy as many of us make little effort apart from using a big lock to stop our bikes getting nicked and then recovered.

    It also doesn’t help that shops and manufactures have absolutely no reason to help to cut crime as if they did they would just be shooting themselves in the foot. It would be interesting to know how big the market is for shops replacing stolen bikes. If they did care then they would record the frame numbers of every bike and upload it with the customer details to the police property register. If every bike shop did this then all the recovered bikes could be easily returned to their owner.

    hora
    Free Member

    To be fair I think cyclists are their own worst enemy

    Two words: Shed thefts.

    hora
    Free Member

    Plus if you know the item is cheaper than usual, you know its been stolen. That makes you a thief in a den of thieves.

    Its not a case of ‘I bagged a bargain’ but you’ve handled stolen goods which is a criminal offence.

    I’d never do it (on anything – TV etc) not because I’m a saint just that I don’t want to be part of such behaviour.

    Folk who lock their bikes up in sheds under the thinking ‘they are insured’ are also helping to fuel the trade and subsequent continuing income for thieves and their families.

    CharlieMungus
    Free Member

    You would be stunned if you saw the number of bikes the police have ‘out the back’ most are crap but there are so many that it would be impossible for the police to even try to start tracing them.

    As the technology gets cheaper, we should be able to buy some modified mobile phone circuitry which can be fitted into a frame, which would allow you to ‘phone’ it and gets it’s position. then go look for it. Problem at the moment is price. How much would you pay for such a device? and how many folks would need to buy one to make it viable, the market probably isn’t there yet.

    That’s why I’m out

    CharlieMungus
    Free Member

    If your frame number is on a nicked database (course, we’d have to sort a proper one of those), it’s forcibly taken from you, on the spot and you can come to the station/warehouse to retrieve your parts within 7days of seizure (or lose them too). I’d support that.

    But then all I would need to do is look at the frame number on your bike, report it to the police as stolen then wait for them to call

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