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Your Bike Just Got Stolen. These Vigilantes Will Get It Back

12 points by fortran77 3y ago

avidiax 3y ago
Definitely is a valuable service, but probably hard to scale in the same way that the crime does. Professional thieves either chop the bikes up or collect them and export. It would be nice to have some kind of international theft settlements/sanctions for those countries that receive stolen goods or allow internet scams. That would at least align incentives somewhat for those in power, but it is still very difficult to sanction enough that it outweighs the bribes from the criminal revenue stream. It's a difficult situation. https://bikeindex.org/news/closing-the-loop-a-deep-dive-on-a-facebook-reseller-of-bikes-stolen-in https://bikeindex.org/news/closing-the-loop-a-deep-dive-on-a...
- thorncorona 3y ago
  Put the thieves in prison. Easily solvable.
- jcarrano 3y ago
  Crime does not scale. It's the same few people stealing the majority of bikes. I'd go as far as to claim almost no thief steal only one bike. Catching thieves and jailing them scales. For each one caught you avoid potentially hundreds of further thefts from that person and an even greater number from the people who will be discouraged from pursuing criminal activities.
- euroderf 3y ago
  I have always suspected that a lot of stolen Finnish bikes (the high-end stuff) ended up in Russia, but AFAIK Customs didn't check outgoing, so who the heck knows. But maybe bike theft trends have changed now that the border is mostly closed. (Dual citizens can still shuttle back & forth, but now they need EU license plates not Russian.)
rfwhyte 3y ago
A decade and a half ago a film-producer buddy and I, along with a motley crew of some other rad folks did a web-series based on putting out a series of "Bait-bikes" and trying to film people stealing them and then us eventually recovering them, with the intention of showcasing how serious a problem bike theft had become in our city. Despite everyone of the half dozen people involved in the project having had the bad luck of having at least one bike stolen each in the past year, for some reason despite a week's worth of sitting out in the cold watching and filming our "Bait-bike" sitting barely locked up in a series of sketch alleys, it didn't get stolen a single damn time! Ironically my producer buddy who started the whole project had his personal bike stolen the week after we wrapped...

12 points by fortran77 3y ago

Definitely is a valuable service, but probably hard to scale in the same way that the crime does. Professional thieves either chop the bikes up or collect them and export. It would be nice to have some kind of international theft settlements/sanctions for those countries that receive stolen goods or allow internet scams. That would at least align incentives somewhat for those in power, but it is still very difficult to sanction enough that it outweighs the bribes from the criminal revenue stream. It's a difficult situation. https://bikeindex.org/news/closing-the-loop-a-deep-dive-on-a-facebook-reseller-of-bikes-stolen-in https://bikeindex.org/news/closing-the-loop-a-deep-dive-on-a...

thorncorona 3y ago
Put the thieves in prison. Easily solvable.
jcarrano 3y ago
Crime does not scale. It's the same few people stealing the majority of bikes. I'd go as far as to claim almost no thief steal only one bike. Catching thieves and jailing them scales. For each one caught you avoid potentially hundreds of further thefts from that person and an even greater number from the people who will be discouraged from pursuing criminal activities.
euroderf 3y ago
I have always suspected that a lot of stolen Finnish bikes (the high-end stuff) ended up in Russia, but AFAIK Customs didn't check outgoing, so who the heck knows. But maybe bike theft trends have changed now that the border is mostly closed. (Dual citizens can still shuttle back & forth, but now they need EU license plates not Russian.)

rfwhyte 3y ago

A decade and a half ago a film-producer buddy and I, along with a motley crew of some other rad folks did a web-series based on putting out a series of "Bait-bikes" and trying to film people stealing them and then us eventually recovering them, with the intention of showcasing how serious a problem bike theft had become in our city. Despite everyone of the half dozen people involved in the project having had the bad luck of having at least one bike stolen each in the past year, for some reason despite a week's worth of sitting out in the cold watching and filming our "Bait-bike" sitting barely locked up in a series of sketch alleys, it didn't get stolen a single damn time! Ironically my producer buddy who started the whole project had his personal bike stolen the week after we wrapped...