Beat thieves with a Singletrack Subscription

I see that comments have been disabled.
Is that to stop anyone asking the obvious question;
“What’s to stop a thief simply peeling the sticker off ?”

Also just because all of the recovered bikes has tags on doesn’t make it a 100% recovery rate, how many bikes were stolen with a tag and not recovered?

Comments on that news item were initially enabled – and there were a couple of critical ones along the lines of both of the above posts. Then they disappeared and comments were disabled before I had a chance to make a similar point.

The stickers won’t just peel off. We’ve tried. You need to scratch them off with a blade or something. They are extremely sticky and pretty permanent. The idea is that if you see a bike with the remnants of a tag on that alone should start alarm bells ringing and cause extra questions to be asked.

The idea, as with all security systems, is that a tagged bike will cause a thief (especially an opportune thief) to move on and consider an easier target. No security system offers 100% security. But the fact is that you reduce the risk of your bike being stolen if it is tagged even if you don’t eliminate the possibility.

The comments have been switched off as it’s a promotional story to help us sell subs. Having this conversation on the actual story wouldn’t help us to do that, especially with comments from users passing sweeping judgements that are not based on actually using or seeing the product. So we’ve disabled comments. We do this with stories from time to time.

But by all means lets discuss the benefits or not here on the forum.

There were comments on the story regarding the fact you can find the value of a bike by scanning the tag if the user has included that information in their database entry. The poster considered this a way of a thief finding out if it’s a good target to steal or not. My thoughts are that this is not how bike thieves in the main operate. They either know the value of a bike when they see it or they don’t care as it’s just going to earn them their next hit regardless of it’s value.

TBH, given the relative costs of forks and frames these days, you gotta wonder where the sticker is best, err, stuck.

just because all of the recovered bikes has tags on doesn’t make it a 100% recovery rate

I think you will find 60% of the time it works every time 🙂

I think their claim of a 100% recovery rate is a bit imaginative and I suspect it was only so successful because it is not yet successful.
By that, I mean that bike thieves are unlikely to remove or cover up some random bar code sticker that they don’t recognise, which is why the recovered bikes still had their stickers.
Once it becomes widely known what the stickers are, I suspect recovery rates will drop to near zero.

Cross posted with Mark earlier.
Regarding the difficulty of scratching the sticker off, if I was going to steal a bike, I would simply add a large sticker to my toolkit of bolt croppers and battery powered angle grinder to temporarily cover the bar code up.
I would then set to with the hot air gun later in the comfort of my own home.

yes, I think you could circumvent the system that way But the simple statistical fact that thieves go for easy targets still means a tagged bike is more likely to be left than an untagged bike. Making sure you have a big sticker handy and a heat gun at home so you can take care of the tag is just not something that your everyday thief is going to prepare for. Maybe some will, but most won’t – and that means you are still reducing the risk of theft by using the system. All security is a numbers game. All systems can be beaten – even physical locks. But locking your bike will mean the unlocked bike will be at a higher risk of being stolen. The same applies to these tags. A tagged bike will have a reduced chance of being stolen.

I wasn’t saying this was a bad idea BTW, just that I hate misleading statistics!

Isn’t it likely that only the most valuable bikes will be tagged? i.e. who would bother with an old beater. That would give any would-be thieves an indication of what to go for.

Seems like a fine idea to me. As Mark says, it is just about making your bike less of a target than the one next to it.

Having said that, the systems with RFID chips hidden inside the frame (like http://www.immobilise.com/how-to-register-your-bicycle.html and https://www.bikeregister.com/shop/bikeregister/gold-kit ) seem like they’d be a bit harder to circumvent.

By the way, you can register your bike for free on some of those sites (e.g. just a note of Frame number against your contact details).

Maybe a gert big **** off lock would be a better free gift instead of a sticker?

Having said that, the systems with RFID chips hidden inside the frame (like http://www.immobilise.com/how-to-register-your-bicycle.html and https://www.bikeregister.com/shop/bikeregister/gold-kit ) seem like they’d be a bit harder to circumvent.

By the way, you can register your bike for free on some of those sites (e.g. just a note of Frame number against your contact details).

I did this with my full susser. It sadly didn’t stop someone robbing it from my shed 🙁

By the way, you can register your bike for free on some of those sites (e.g. just a note of Frame number against your contact details).

as the Onion alluded to

In a lot of cases the frame is not the target, they’ll even chop it in order to do away with the bike and sell on the parts, leaving the frame to spend eternity at the bottom of the canal

There are two stickers in each pack so you can stick one on your frame and the other on your forks.

Maybe a gert big **** off lock would be a better free gift instead of a sticker?

The postage! WON’T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE POSTAGE!

🙂

FTFY !

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=bike+lock

Use Amazon to ship these sign up for “Prime” £49 per annum, that’s 5p per 1000 subscribers. Bargintastic. 😉

I also made a comment having scanned the “example” on the website and got all the information about the bike, including value and full component list.
Control C, Control V –> Ebay!

I’m not saying these are a bad idea – I’ll like an extra deterrent and way of recovering a stolen bike – and my forks are def worth more than my frame so would need a separate sticker! They just maybe need to make the info about bikes a bit more protected?

I think you overestimate a typical bike thief, he needs to get some money for heroin usually
If its not locked up he will take it no matter how many fancy stickers are on it
If its locked up, he will try his best to nick it, no matter how many fancy stickers are on it
If he gets it, he will sell it as quick as he can, with the fancy sticker still on it more often than not
That’s from 25 years experience as a cop!
Best bet is to place a piece of paper somewhere in the frame known to you with your details on, and if the cops ever do recover he frame, it will prove its yours.
These stickers really are not worth the tough plastic they are printed on , as a theft deterrent , in my opinion

I wonder if you could point us to the simple statistical fact that bikes that are tagged are less likely to be stolen

& on a slightly different tack for all the loyal subscribers.

Is it getting like car insurance in that we have to cancel our subs & renew to get the offers.

Isn’t a bit of paper tucked in the frame with your details on doing the exact same job as the tags? And as a cop when was the last time you recovered a bike and thought of looking inside the frame to see if there’s a bit of paper stuffed in there? If there was a tag on it would you not think of scanning the tag to find the owner since that’s what the tag is for?

Why is adding information to a bike that a) will reduce th risk of theft (even if only slightly) and b) increase the chance of a stolen bike being recovered as the details of the owner are just a scan away, and c) will alert a potential buyer of a stolen bike that the bike is in fact stolen, such a bad idea? Especially when the kit costs under a tenner or is free with a sub?

Mad Bill,
We managed to source 200 of these kits. Before that we had 200 guide books, before that 200 t-shirts. These are all paid for somehow. Just using them for new subscribers has meant all 600 gifts lasted barely a month. If we opened the deal up to all renewals too that stock would last a week or two at best.

I blogged about this very issue here. http://singletrackworld.com/blogs/2012/10/subs-deals-what-are-we-playing-at/

I wonder if you could point us to the simple statistical fact that bikes that are tagged are less likely to be stolen

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/marketing-maths
😉

MadBillMcMad – Member
& on a slightly different tack for all the loyal subscribers.

Is it getting like car insurance in that we have to cancel our subs & renew to get the offers.

surprisingly my renewal quote was cheaper than the price I could find elsewhere, would lead me to think that some companies are prioritising retention

By the way, BikeRegister is “the MPS preferred cycle registration database” so clearly some police think this kind of thing is worth doing.

mark
im not knocking the idea, just the way you tried to big the stickers up, which after all is just what they are, visible stickes that can be scratched/peeled off fairly easily, leaving no trace of the barcode thingy 😕
in my 25 years as an operational police officer i have given these kits out, had my staff promote them, but in all honesty i think they do very little in stopping the acyual thief, they may make the owners think more about security etc, therefore making theft less likely
i always look inside tubes for i.d, only ever found 2, but thats better than none.
i can give you a statistic thats real, ive lost count of the number of reports of stolen pedal cycles that i have been to where the victim has said, “it was property marked with a sticker”
i have recovered hundreds of cycles over the years,security stickers and frame numbers were removed on most of them by the thieves.
stamping is best as grinding the numbers off is not foolproof, we can retrieve them sometimes.
Thieves are resourceful and crafty, so more than a sticker is usually needed to defeat them, its usually the hidden items like the chips or bits of paper in the frame that they miss, thats my real world experience anyway

visible stickers that can be scratched/peeled off fairly easily, leaving no trace of the barcode thingy

Sorry but I have to pull you up on this. As someone who has played with these particular stickers I can categorically say they are in no way easy to peel off at all. Once they are on they won’t come off without taking the paint with them. You can destroy the actual QR code part to stop it from working but you really can’t get them off without damaging the paintwork and leaving a lot of obvious signs that some kind of sticker was there. That’s the whole point of these things. They are NOT easy to get off. Plus, the other side of the system is the registration part. If your bike is stolen you have an increased chance of recovering it over a bike that isn’t stickered OR registered in the Bike Shepherd database. Remember, fundametally this is a REGISTRATION system that uses some very difficult to remove stickers to enable anyone with a smartphone to find out the status of the bike. None of that is particularly groundbreaking technology apart from the ease with which anyone can now scan the tag, so long as they have a smartphone with a scanning app installed.

Surely as a police officer you understand the merits of registering property in an easily searchable database? This one doesn’t need fancy scanners that only a few police stations are equipped with – anyone with a smartphone can scan the bike. Even if the sticker can’t be scanned you can still do a search on the bike registration number and see if it shows up in the same way that a standard bike registration database system works.

I’m not saying and I have taken great pains NOT to say that this system is a way of securing your bike or preventing it from being stolen. I am saying that it will reduce the chance of theft (even if we argue over the extent of that statistical reduction) and if your bike is stolen this system will increase the chances of recovery.

It’s a cheap and easily implemented additional security measure and have you really handed out THESE particular kits before? With scannable QR codes? As far as I’m aware they haven’t been provided to the police to hand out as they only came to market a little over a year or so ago. Are you talking about another system or these in particular?

Or is it actually the case that you’ve never tried to remove one of these Kryptonite BikeShepherd stickers so you really don’t know and perhaps the kits you’ve been handing out for years are not actually these ones at all?

I’m not trying to ‘big them up’. But I am trying to counter the arguments, from the likes of yourself, that rather unfairly, and without any seeming experience of the product, are trying to dismiss them as useless – They patently aren’t useless since there are bike owners out there who have recovered their stolen property as a direct result of this system. If there had been no success stories at all then I’d be inclined to agree with you.

arguing about nothing, its gotta be an STW forum

Mark,
I’ve not had any experience of these kits
They are not useless
They have. A minimal effect on deterring thieves, because they are visible and can be removed(paint damaged)
When removed there will be no way of tracing the bike on the register?
Even the simplest thief would not leave a security sticker on a stolen bike,
Send me a sticker, I’ll give it to one of my offenders and I bet he can remove it without trace within a day!

Seriously, I’m not saying they are useless, I’m my opinion these systems have limited success because of the sticker element of the system , the property registration is key to recovering property.

What system would you recommend then easygirl?
DataTag hidden in the frame somewhere?

datatag hidden in frame is the best for identifying a stolen bike without the thief knowing, in my view
as for deterring a thief, as i said its difficult when the only thing on their mind is heroin, not getting caught or going to prison
only trying to be honest, from my experience 🙁

In your experience do the police actually look for datatags? i.e. do they have the correct equipment available to them? One benefit of the BikeShepherd stickers I guess is that they don’t need specialist scanning equipment, just a phone app.

as for deterring a thief, as i said its difficult when the only thing on their mind is heroin, not getting caught or going to prison

Hmm.. maybe we should just hang a few baggies of skag on our frames? Probably work out cheaper.