Picture: Jordan Siemens (Getty Images)
There’s a continuous rise in bike theft that struck even before the pandemic gotten here in 2020. The resulting uptick in biking and retail bike sales that year worked as an accelerant to thrust bike-related criminal activities to all-time highs. Wired looked for the competence of a bike hunter to discover what was occurring to all these bikes after they were removed the street or out of storage facilities.
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For crooks, high-end bikes are extremely attractive targets. They are light, portable and cost countless dollars each. The hard part is fencing the product in a manner where a victim can’t come across their own bike for sale. Bryan Hance, the co-founder of a bike registration site, informed Wired that he found taken bikes were being trafficked to Mexico and resold online:
This newest e-mail about the bike was from a confidential source. The tipster pointed Hance to a Facebook page where there were more taken bikes for sale– like a sweet 2018 Pivot Mach 4 mtb that offers brand-new for about $7,000 and had actually been pinched from a San Jose garage 2 months previous; and a Specialized Stumpjumper Comp Carbon in area blue that had actually disappeared almost 3 weeks prior from Santa Clara, about 45 miles south of San Francisco. All of the bikes were late-model and costly. All had actually vanished just recently from around Silicon Valley, where biking was stylish amongst tech employees. All were for sale at about one-third of their initial rates. Hance believed he ‘d seen whatever in his years bird-dogging taken bikes. This put him on his heels.
One information flummoxed Hance. The idea had actually originated from Mexico. The tipster had actually discovered the bikes for sale there, on the Facebook page of a business called Constru-Bikes, though the spelling often differed somewhat, which seemed based in the state of Jalisco. Hance had actually heard reports of global bike criminal offense for a very long time, however they were just that: reports. Bike Index rarely even had an existence in Mexico.
The Facebook account even confessed the bikes were taken. It rapidly ended up being clear to Hance that the page of being run by a single person, Ricardo Estrada Zamora. He wasn’t solitarily taking all the bikes himself however was the endpoint of an extensive criminal market. Check out the entire piece at Wired to learn more about Hance’s efforts to get police to in fact act and how it played out.
A variation of this post initially appeared on Jalopnik
