Originally Posted by ChAnMaN
but what do they do with them? is there some kinda of highpaying underground market for stolen bicycles? i mean, any real cyclist who wanted a nice bike would go to a bikeshop...so who buys all these nice bikes from the crooks?
A lot of people want nice things but aren't nice people. Some people may not realize that they are buying hot property, some may not realize because subconciously it is easier to not know, and many just don't care.
When I was younger I worked a lot of retail. We caught boosters all the time. At least half of them were well dressed, intelligent(ish) people that would just rather steal than pay. Many of them were teenagers with more money in their pockets than I had in mine.
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Several years ago I had a friend that lost over 250 pounds when he was around 20 years old. He bought himself a Cannondale mountain bike to reward himself. It was also his only means of transportation. He lived in a small apartment near an university and locked his bike with a U lock at night to a 4 x 4 support post that held up the deck of the apartment above. He knew it was risky, but the bike was a yard from his bedroom window and about 4 feet from his head when he slept and he thought he would hear anyone on his porch. He woke one morning to find a six inch section of the post missing along with his bike. He slept like a baby.
I had another female friend that used to ride one of those big trikes. She had rods in her back and lots of other health problems and couldn't drive a car or ride a regular bike. Some bangers in her neighborhood stole her locked trike from her back yard and proceded to ride it around the area right in plain site. She and her boyfriend went down to ask them if they would return it and got shot at for their troubles. The little jerks didn't steal it to sell it, and it certainly wasn't "cool" like a high end bike, they basically stole it because they could.
Keep your serial numbers recorder and mark as many parts of the bike as possible. I knew another person that got their bike back because they had written some ID info on a index card and stuffed it up the seat post. When the police found the bike, which had been reported stolen, they asked the guy to prove it was his. He pulled the card out, the cops laughed, and the other "owner" got charged.
