Petition: make serial numbers mandatory in Ebay listings

getting people to secure their bikes properly in the first place might be a better place to focus your efforts

Believe me the police do a lot of work on this. Bike theft in Bristol has actually come down by nearly 10% over the past couple of years but I don’t think that’s the high-end stuff, it’s poorly secured bikes that are left unlocked or cable locked.

My bike doesn’t have a serial number

Borrow a set of letter punches, hell, even a dot punch and mark it.

The police use a system for filing theft reports which is well out of date and not relevant to modern MTBs (Sample questions: “Does it have more than 7 gears?” “Does it have basket?”).

Unless you expect the jobbing officer who investigates to be able to identify, for example, the difference between an SLX and an LX groupset, the serial number is your best bet. Not everyone is a bike nerd but anyone can check a serial number.

If sellers list the number and you don’t have it in some pre recorded data it would be useless?

So note down your serial number already! Then you’ll be able to give it to the police when you file a theft report. There are lots of unclaimed bikes at police stations and a key reason is people not recording serial numbers.

The thieves just gonna break our bike and will sell it as spare parts which is a hundred times more difficult for us or the police who monitor this thing. ..

They’re doing this already, in some cases they’ll even cut through a frame to steal the parts. However this writes off the most valuable bit of many bikes, and is a lot more effort.

If we could also do this for suspension forks it would be amazing.

Oh so bike theft is the fault of the people who own the bikes not securing them properly!!!

No, not at all. But neither is the non-displaying of serial numbers on eBay adverts. One would aid in reducing the number of bikes being stolen. Thats a fact. One might aid in reducing the number of stolen bikes being shifted through eBay which I doubt very much would make your average brain dead piece of theiving scum think twice about nicking it in the first place.

In all honesty, how much stolen goods, as a percentage, do you think gets shifted by eBay? How many stolen bike threads on here vs ‘I found my bike being sold on eBay’ threads?

I applaud any type of action towards reducing bike theft – I just don’t agree that this is an especially good one IMHO for the reasons I and others have pointed out. Putting effort into some kind of GPS tracker thing that could be glued inside the frame – now thats something I’d support!

In all honesty, how much stolen goods, as a percentage, do you think gets shifted by eBay?

There are NO controls on the origin of stuff that people sell on eBay. In some cases they’ll act on large-scale organised theft or fraud, but for small beer like mountain bikes, they have “feedback”, the weakest system of ensuring seller honesty imaginable.

All feedback does is say “Thanks for selling me the cheap thing!”. There’s no incentive to report dishonesty, and there are well-documented instances of “power sellers” and respectable large-scale sellers who were also thieves.

Putting effort into some kind of GPS tracker thing that could be glued inside the frame – now thats something I’d support!

One of these already exists but it’ll cost you a cool £120.00.

http://www.integratedtrackers.com/GPSTrack/Spybike.jsp

One of these already exists but it’ll cost you a cool £120.00

A mere 5% of the cost of your average full-susser-extreme-xc-am-dh-enduro-park-weekend-warrior-pub-rig then.

😀

Borrow a set of letter punches, hell, even a dot punch and mark it.

On a carbon frame? – I’ll pass thanks, as I suspect the warranty would be worthless [and maybe the frame] after that.

That Spybike thing is 50% of the average cost of a new bike in the UK, so clearly not for everyone.

http://www.bikebiz.com/news/read/how-much-is-the-average-price-of-a-bike-in-the-uk-280/012014

Besides, how are you going to afford one of those if you’ve already spaffed double the price on your mandatory office chair seatpost?

Would logging owner’s name/address and link that to the serial no and warranty etc at point of sale from initial purchase be more worthwhile?

On a carbon frame?

You could mark the inside of a dropout. That’s where many carbon frames have them already.

Or these people sell an ID marking kit with 3 scannable QR code stickers. They’re similar to the little sticker on a car engine with the VIN number and it’d be difficult to remove them without damaging the frame. You could cover them up or buff the QR code off but it’d look pretty fishy.

Would logging owner’s name/address and link that to the serial no and warranty etc at point of sale from initial purchase be more worthwhile?

Some bike shops already do this, but it’s extra hassle for a small business, and if anything it’d deter people from recording their serial number themselves.

One of these already exists but it’ll cost you a cool £120.00.

A bargain. Bike gets nicked. Turn on the tracker and get it back. Easy peasy. Could be used to lower insurance premiums too like they do for cars.

Writing down your serial number. Bike gets nicked. Sit twiddling your thumbs waiting for the rozzers to find it accidentally whilst raiding a house for something else or for some cretin who more than likely has bought it off someone who bought it off someone else x 10 to pop it on eBay.

All very true, with a few caveats.

you won’t know exactly which house the thief lives in. Try knocking on every door in a block of flats, asking each person who answers if they stole your bike and see what sort of reception you get.

And when you find the right one they probably won’t politely hand it back and offer you a cup of tea, as Mark did. Would the police have time and inclincation to follow your tip-off?

From a review of a previous version:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/bike-blog/2011/apr/06/spylamp-anti-bike-theft-device

You could mark the inside of a dropout. That’s where many carbon frames have them already.

Fair enough but your petition is to make a serial number mandatory for selling on ebay, is it not? – a laudable cause in itself.

So a thief ends up with a bike sans any serial number, [there’s lots around] all he needs to do is make a number up and stamp it on the frame then? Absolutely no way to check if it’s Kosher.
Say I did stamp my bike in order to sell it on ebay, how could I be identified as a genuine seller rather than a thief that stamped his own number in?

Slight hijack.

Is it worth putting serial numbers onto one of those website databases? I think they claim to be used by the police, but never really know if its worth it.

/hijack

Also, I quite like the Bike Shepherd idea. Anyone know how good the stickers are? Is it worth £10 / bike?

IIRC my old Planet X had a sticker with a serial number on it. Wouldn’ take too much effort with a dymo to recreate the same legit serial number on a different frame.

Is it worth putting serial numbers onto one of those website databases? I think they claim to be used by the police, but never really know if its worth it.

Yes, for a couple of reasons. Apparently it can be quite a faff for police to check theft reports from other forces in the country, looking a bike up on Immobilise or similar is much easier.

And apparently some really cheeky thieves check whether a bike’s been registered already, and if it’s not they register it to themselves. I suspect this wouldn’t fool the police for long but it could confuse things.

Say I did stamp my bike in order to sell it on ebay, how could I be identified as a genuine seller rather than a thief that stamped his own number in?

If there wasn’t a theft report with that serial number then why would the police care?

Sheesh, some people are really getting this round their necks…

Sheesh, some people are really getting this round their necks…

No not at all, as I said it’s laudable just that it has fundamental flaws in its current form

If eBay were to take up your idea and I wanted to sell my bike without a number, I’d need to stamp etc. one on it
My point was that if a thief ‘acquired’ a similarly numberless frame, that’s all he’d have to do too and as there wouldn’t be a theft report with that number on it, it’d be as good as gold to them.

And me…

I applaud any type of action towards reducing bike theft – I just don’t agree that this is an especially good one IMHO for the reasons I and others have pointed out.

My point was that if a thief ‘acquired’ a similarly numberless frame, that’s all he’d have to do too and as there wouldn’t be a theft report with that number on it, it’d be as good as gold to them.

Setting aside the fact that there’s only a tiny minority of bike frames with no serial, if a frame has no number, and you haven’t marked it in any way, you’re much less likely to get it back.

I’m speaking here as someone who was very fortunate to get a bike returned after I spotted it on eBay. I didn’t have the serial number but luckily when it was recovered it still had the SSUK 2007 top cap with my name on it.