153: Bike Index

visited the Facebook campus once.

It's in the Bay Area near San Francisco, California.

Yeah, I just showed up unannounced and walked around the place.

My friend was with me and he had to pee, so we looked for a way in, but we couldn't find any way into the buildings.

We were just curious what it was like inside, though.

But while I was walking around the Facebook campus, I saw a bunch of bicycles painted in the Facebook blue with the Facebook logo on them.

Apparently, it's a thing in Silicon Valley that tech giants like Google and Facebook have these bikes around their campus for anyone to use.

For when you need to get to a meeting in another building, just hop on one of the company bikes and take it where you want.

It makes it super convenient to get around their large campuses.

Well, since I was there and I saw these bikes, I decided to hop on one and go for a ride.

They aren't locked or have any code or anything.

They're just sitting there for anyone to use.

Dozens of them are all over the campus.

So I hopped on one and I rode it around, zooming down sidewalks, ripping around corners.

and for a brief moment, I felt like a Facebook employee, whizzing by other people I presumed to be employees.

Nobody said anything.

And I left the bike on the other side of the campus.

As I spent more time in Silicon Valley, I saw more and more of these bikes all over the place.

Like people had ridden bikes from the Google campus over to the HP campus, or you'd see Facebook bikes over at the Cisco offices.

The bikes were scattered all over town.

And I presume it's because people ride them from office to office.

And maybe they're inside doing some meeting or something, and they'll ride back later.

But the thing I couldn't understand was this being so close to San Jose in the Bay Area, and these bikes just sitting right out front with no chain or lock.

Why aren't these bikes stolen like the very moment someone walks away from it?

I mean, I didn't just ride one, I rode a handful.

It became a thing.

Every time I saw one around, I'd hop on it for a little joyride.

And so, if I could jump on them so easily and ride off wherever I wanted, what's stopping anyone from just stealing them all?

These are true stories from the dark side of the internet.

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You ready?

Mm-hmm.

Do you, what kind of, what name should we use for you?

You can call me Brian.

It's okay.

I'm not cool enough to have a nom de guerre.

Brian, have you ever got your bike stolen?

I have indeed, yes.

Tell me about it.

The worst one, the one that I remember with like the most pain, was a Cannondale M300.

It was like a mountain bike.

It was one of the first I'd really spent a decent amount of money on.

This is back when I was at the University of Arizona.

And I had this crappy little shotgun apartment where everything was stored in the front.

The shower was all the way in the back.

And I came home one day and I went and took a shower and I like walk out into the front of my apartment.

I'm like, something is different.

Somebody had come in the front door while I was in the shower.

What?

And robbed me and then taken the bike and taken off on the bike.

While you were showering.

While I was showering.

How is this possible?

I don't know, but it was, that's the one that I, that was, you know, that was one of many, but that's the one that finally like broke my brain.

And, and I just, I, to this day, whenever I see like a Canno Dale M300 going on the road, I'm like, son of a bitch, I remember like it really sticks with me.

I can't believe, I can't believe somebody came in your apartment to do it while you're showering.

Yeah, that one, that one, that one hurt.

So did you try looking for that bike?

I did.

Where did you look?

I mean,

you look around, you physically look around.

We kind of knew where the dodgy spots were.

And every single, you know, if you've ever had something like that stolen from you,

you know, anytime you're out, if you see one that's even remotely, the shade of that, like the hairs on the back of your neck stand up and you're always like thinking, like, is that it?

Is that it?

You know, and you go scope it out.

But there wasn't much.

I mean, you watched back then, it was Craigslist.

You watched Craigslist, you could like talk to local bike shops and you could physically just go run around looking for the damn thing.

What about the police?

It wasn't really a thing.

And that was sort of like,

you know,

college towns, like there's campus police and there's city police.

And I did report it with the campus police, but it was like, and I asked somebody, it was like, so what happens if the city picks it up?

They're like, oh, no, you're on your own.

You have to go report to them too.

And you could see this sort of like there were two silos, you know, they're two systems.

They didn't talk to each other.

This is stupid.

Brian was frustrated that there was little to no help for him.

And he knew it wasn't just him who had a stolen bike.

Lots of people must feel frustrated like this too.

Like, what do you do?

Go to every bike and pawn shop in town, give them the serial number and say, hey, call me if anyone tries to sell you this bike here.

And then call the police and the campus police and put up posters around town.

It's really hard to spread the word that your bike got stolen.

And here's what it looks like in case you see it.

Surely there's got to be a better solution to this problem.

So I mean, in a way, that bike was kind of the impetus for this whole, this, this whole thing.

It was like, that's my origin story, right?

Like, um, because this is like 98, 99, 2000-ish, like that era.

I was lucky enough to be in computer science.

It was like right when, you know, text messaging was still like a new, it was like you could, you, all this technology, like a lot of free databases were out, a lot of people were getting into web development, like PHP was that, like, it was this perfect storm time of like some schmuck like me could be like, you know what, I'm going to do, I'm going to create a bike database for stolen bikes and I'm going to like tackle this thing.

And for once, like, all that technology was actually there.

And like, anybody with half a brain could see, you know, in five years from now, the phones are going to be away at a baywater.

You knew, like, even if you had this crappy little website at the start.

So I started a site called Stolen Bicycle Registry.

And what was it?

What did it do?

It literally just let you

put in, make model color cereal, add some photos, and add a description.

And it was the first sort of free open database of stolen bikes at that point.

And I only cared about stolen.

I never cared about like what happened to them before they were stolen.

It was purely everything in this database is stolen.

His idea is that if your bike is stolen, let him know.

And he'll try to tell everyone around town that, hey, before you buy or sell or repair a bicycle, look it up in this database first.

Basically, it's a place that's easy to report a stolen bike to and one that's easy to search for stolen bikes to.

So bike shops and pawn shops started appreciating this site to be able to easily check if this bike has been reported stolen.

It's kind of impossible to ask every police department in the nation if this bike is stolen.

But when there's a nice simple site online that will tell you, well, that made it easier to check.

But really, is this going to work?

Like, is anyone actually going to use the site to check if a bike is stolen before buying it?

Somebody was trying to buy a bike off Craigslist and they ran a serial number and it was listed on my site.

He was able to tell the victim, hey, someone found your bike.

It's for sale right now on Craigslist.

Look.

And from there, the victim was able to go get their bike back.

We got a recovered bike.

It worked.

The site got a stolen bike back to the owner.

And sure enough, not long after that happened, another stolen bike was found and recovered.

This was a good idea.

The site was working.

This gave Brian fresh energy to work harder at spreading the word.

He was pumped that he helped two people recover their bikes.

It's pretty, it's amazing.

It was pretty great.

I mean, there's no money in it, but it's high karma.

It feels really good.

to just have built something that had like people want to use and it works well.

He made it so if you found a stolen bike, you could directly contact the person who lost it.

At that point, in that site, you could just basically click a button and be like, hey, dude, I've got your bike.

And it would shoot an email off to the owner and that would put them in touch.

I'm not going to handle every single one of these.

It's just like finder, meet owner.

You guys work it out.

He kept the site going and was helping more and more people find their bikes.

But after a while, it became a lot to keep up with.

The site wasn't making any money.

It was just a labor of love.

And he kind of needed some help.

Yeah, so I only ever cared about stolen.

And in like 2013, 2012, 2013, this bike mechanic in Chicago named Seth Hurr ran a Kickstarter that was sort of the opposite.

He was working in bike shops and he was sick of like, you know, they sell a bunch of bikes.

They get stolen.

People would come back.

They'd have to go through like physical paper.

It just sucked.

It was like a really bad process.

And he was like learning Ruby and he was sort of coming at it from the other angle, which is like, let's just get these things registered the moment.

Like the moment I swipe your credit card and go boop on my point of sale system, like I want that bike registered.

And that just solves everybody's problem.

You don't have to do any work.

I don't have to do any work.

It just goes into this thing.

So he, he ran, I was like, oh, that's a really cool idea.

And then he ran a Kickstarter and raised like 50 grand.

I was like, son, motherfucker, I've been doing this for 10 years and no one's ever donated to me.

So I reached out to him and we met and we chatted and we just, we just realized, you know, we're working on the same thing.

Like you're, you're, you're doing the first part, which is the annoying, let's get humans to do something new part, but you're being cool about it by putting putting it into point-of-sale systems, and it just makes people participate.

I'm doing all the weird, nitty-gritty, terrible black bag, let's chase bad guy.

Like, and neither one of us really gave a shit about our other, like, he didn't want to do stolen stuff, and I didn't want to do pre-registration stuff.

So, we joined forces, and it was just from day one after that, it was just

success, success, success.

And we just iteratively built it into a much better system

together.

They created the website bikeindex.org.

And with the combined forces, their reach got a lot wider, which meant more people were using the site and more stolen bikes were being recovered.

As people were learning about this site, they would go on there and check to see if this bike was stolen before buying it off of someone.

And if there was a hit, they'd tell the bike owner, hey, I think I found your bike.

You know, we spent like 10 years just begging people, like, please use this thing.

You know, we're nonprofit.

It's free.

We love helping people.

You love helping your customers.

You know, victims love getting their bikes back like everybody wins there's no there's no gotcha here right you know like like writing blog posts doing prep it was just like you know because it only works if a ton of people use it and is it uh specific cities or no it's all it's universal it's all over the world i mean it's us and canada focused but but we had we've recovered bikes like in australia and belgium

there was a real tipping point though where

I want to say it was like maybe 2018, 2019, where it no longer became, please, please, please use the service.

It became, became, for me,

we have so much data and so much information coming our way about bad, like, I'm chasing bad guys now.

I can, I can tell you, like, if you come to me and say, I got my bike stolen in Seattle beforehand, it was like, please use bike index.

Now it's like, no, these are the four motherfuckers you need to keep an eye on.

Watch this, like, like, these are the bad guys in your zip code.

And I know this because we've just been looking at these guys for so long.

And we just had so much data about

where stuff was getting stolen, where it was popping up, who it was popping up with, which ones were going like cross-border.

It just switched from like, please use my service to like, I'm actually now able to discern patterns and do sort of like, like, I really can identify like some of the flows.

The scenario I always tell people is like, so say somebody robs your house on Monday.

By Monday night, Before you can even make a police report, probably depending on what city you're in, especially during the pandemic, all that shit is already for sale somewhere.

Typically online, it's on OfferUp, it's on Facebook Marketplace, it's on any of these other dodgy like sales apps.

And

what happens a lot is, you know, they take your computers, they take your bikes,

they take your jewelry, they take everything.

And somebody is like scrolling through OfferUp and it's like, you know, Joe Slea's bag 420 Bong Master 7 has all this brand new shit for sale.

I think that's your bike.

So they go to Bike Index, they send in a message and says, hey, I I was just looking at this super sketchy dude on OfferUp.

He's got your bike.

I think it looks like he has your bike because you listed this bike and it looks unique.

Like, I was thinking about buying it, but I see that it might be stolen.

So I just want to give you a heads up.

And then the victim pulls up OfferUp and is like, oh, not like, yeah, that's my bike.

But not only is that my bike, that's all my other shit.

Like, this is the guy.

This is the guy who robbed me.

Like, this is all my stuff.

And it's, and you haven't even had time to make a police report.

And over time, you sort, like, sometimes you get help, sometimes you don't.

Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

Sometimes the victims call the cops, and the cops are like, Yeah, let's go get this guy.

Boom, like everybody wraps up and wraps for dinner, and it's a great day.

And then

what a great feeling that must be to be like, you come home, you realize your stuff's been stolen, and you're like, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, what do I do?

And you look at your phone and it's like, hey, I think I found it.

It's like, I didn't even tell anybody.

The crazier ones are like, so we've had people pop burglars before the victims knew they had been robbed.

Wow.

Because,

like, so the one that came, the one that I'm thinking about was out of Seattle.

It was like a Colnago, a fairly decent, it was pretty, pretty high-end bike for sale with this sketchball.

And it had been listed on bike index, but not stolen, not marked stolen.

It had just been listed years before.

And the guy, the guy who, the one of the, the bike chaser who was, who was kind of chasing this thing starts looking into the guy and it's getting more interesting and more interesting and more interesting.

He's like, man, just call this dude up.

So we call this guy up and he's in Hawaii.

He's on vacation.

He's like, can you send me that link?

So we send him that link.

He's like, that's all my shit.

That's like, I'm not even home.

I didn't even like call the cops, right?

So he didn't even know I'd been robbed.

These guys had literally done it like the night before and they're just trying to get rid of the stuff as fast as they could.

And that's a great feeling.

That's a slam dunk.

That like that, I could live off that for a week.

You know, it's such a good, like, I have a day gig and I like my day gig, but it's not like a pretty soul-enriching day gig.

But like, I get one or two bikes back and I'm like, I'm on cloud nine because you're pulling complete needles out of haystacks.

After spending a decade spreading the word, bikeindex.org now has its own energy and momentum.

It's got the critical mass it deserves to help hundreds and even thousands of people recover their stolen bikes.

It's every bike mechanic that uses us and it's every bike shop that uses us and it's every big brand that you we basically tried to put ourselves in every place your stolen thing could wind up either getting serviced or trying to get sold or try to get marked for sale or like

you know we tie into this pawn search system that, like, if you, if you, if I rob you and take your bike to New York and try to pawn it, it's going to pop up because we partnered with this pawn search system.

We just, we just took everybody in the cycling community.

We're like, here's this free thing.

Please be a node in our network.

to keep an eye out for these things and help recover these things.

And this happens all the time.

It's like thieves will literally get a flat and roll into a bike shop and be like, can you help me with this flat?

And they're like, cool.

They just pull out their phone and like,

bike index.

Like, it's stolen.

Get out of my shop.

We built the thing for the community, right?

Like, we're, we're the glue guys.

We're, we built the thing that, that every single person in this ecosphere could just, if, if everybody wants to like help with this thing, you can use this thing.

We're not getting paid.

We're not making money.

We just want to like keep the bike safe and not let crackheads sell bikes and make thousands of dollars.

But even though they'd sometimes find stolen bikes, they couldn't always get it back.

Like, for instance, calling the cops didn't work every time.

Even if you could prove that that's your bike and here's the person selling it, it wasn't enough for the cops to go get your bike back for you.

So the victims were telling Brian, like, man, what the hell?

How do I get my bike back?

Can't get anybody to help me.

It's middle of the pandemic.

Like,

we have no choice.

We just have to let this go.

And what I tell those people is always like,

we didn't get him this time.

We'll get that motherfucker next time.

And that's where the patterns start coming in.

Because what happens is the next guy that he robs, we can say,

we can tell that victim, oh, you know, when you call your cops, tell him also he's associated with these other, like the first couple people that you could, like, it just sort of builds a case on them.

But it also lets us sort of surveil like

tactics and methodologies.

Like, how, you know, how soon do you post this stuff after you rob somebody?

Like, are you showing stuff in the background that betrays where you're at?

Can we dig into who you are and find some like

information about like where you might be?

Are you dumb enough to take pictures in a location that betrays your actual location?

Those have been super fun where they say, like,

they take a picture of this bike for sale in front of their house.

This happened in Vancouver.

And they inadvertently just put the house number

in the back of the thing.

And when they set it, so we get a hold of the victim.

The victim calls the cops.

Cops call to set up a meet and they meet at like a dairy queen.

They want to meet a block away.

Who's meeting?

The thief has the bad guy that has the bike

is selling it, puts it online, doesn't realize that he's taken a selfie but he's he's showed like his house number in the background we tell the victim this guy's got your stuff the victim's like absolutely that's my stuff and but so they're sort of fake baiting this guy's like man i'm really interested in this bike it looks great i would love my wife to come just some bullshit story right

And what will happen is the seller, not wanting to have you like not, he's like, oh, we'll go meet, you know, near my home.

And he's like in a Walmart or some shit.

But instead, what we have the victims do is go like 40 minutes early and just go right up to his front door and knock on the door and just spook him.

Cause he's like, how the fuck do you know where I live?

Like, but they never put, you know, they never realize you catch them off guard, you catch them off their footing.

They, you know, they haven't had time to sort of look around and see.

And it just scares the shit out of them.

And they, they typically are just like, here you go.

The vast majority of them are within like 20 miles.

They don't, they don't really leave the same state or city.

A lot of them just get, they just get moved a couple of zip codes away and they try to sell them online or fence them to their friends.

So where's the classic places you see them for sale?

I mean, offer up without a doubt.

Fuck those guys.

They're just a chronic, terrible.

They're horrible.

Why are you saying fuck those guys?

Fuck those guys.

Because we have tried for a decade to try to get them to care about the huge amount of stolen.

We have free data.

We have open data.

We have this whole system.

We've demonstrated to them that like, you know, your platform is abused left and right.

Look at all these bad guys.

This guy killed somebody in the 80s and he's selling stuff on your site.

Like you, if you put something in place for bikes, like you do for cars, you assholes, because you have the VIN number so people can get a VIN fax.

And it's like, some of these bikes are worth 10K now.

And you're letting, you know, Meth Lord 472, like sell, like,

you just have, they have, there's no, there's just no vetting.

There's just no, it's just such a rampantly abused place and it has been for so long and they just do not care.

And I know they do not care because we have interfaced with them for years trying to get them to care.

So that OfferUp Facebook marketplace, and then there's a whole sort of crappy constellation of knockoffs of OfferUp that are much lesser players, but it's exactly the same idea.

It's just an app where you can be like, I'm cleaning out my garage.

There are a couple physical markets, but that's fewer and far between.

Like in Oakland, there's a couple of swap meets that are sort of classically known as being real super crazy hotbeds.

The vast majority of them pop up pretty close to home.

He learned there's a whole supply chain network for the stolen bike market.

Like a lot of stolen bikes are not resold by the person who steals them.

They're stolen and then they're taken to a person who can buy it off them real quick.

No questions asked.

We've had people literally like, you know, they break into an apartment building downtown.

They literally just ride to the waterfront and they sell it.

Like it's been like maybe 12 minutes.

We also have them like take it out, stash it, sell it the next couple days or ride the thing to South Portland, go to that house because that guy will give you drugs in exchange for the bike.

Not even converting to money, just like, here's drugs, thanks to the bike and that's the guy that knows you just gave me a three thousand dollar bike i just gave you thirty dollars worth of drugs i can sell this for a grand i still win so all all those scenarios are true it's not just druggies selling stolen bikes though some people are just naive have you ever taken the the deep rabbit hole into like flipper culture like our flipping

Flipping is basically you find an item that maybe you can buy in Portland.

Let's say they're these cute little sweaters that have cats on them or something.

And there's one lady who makes them in Portland and they're really cute and they're really amazing.

You're like, I want to buy 10 of those and I spent $200 on you.

You can put them on Etsy and pretend they're yours and you make $2,000.

And there's all these people that sort of, it's just like.

arbitrage as a sport.

So they're like, I found these stupid doll things at Walmart for whatever.

And I sold one online and I made 28 bucks on it.

So there's this whole culture around flipping, buying a thing, just immediately listing it on some market because it's not on that market or whatever, making some money.

Buy low, sell high.

That's it.

That's all flipper culture is.

But what sucks is they've gotten really into bikes.

So we have these 16, 17-year-old kids who don't understand that like,

you know, some crackhead puts a $3,000 bike on offer up and it's like, need to go ASAP, you know, hit me up next five hours and it's $200.

And that kid's like, I'm going to buy that for $200 because I just researched it and I can sell it for $3,000.

And they just don't, they're naive enough or dumb enough that they don't care.

All I know is I spent $200 on this thing.

I'm pretty damn sure I can sell it for $3K.

Time and time again, Brian would spot patterns that reveals exactly who the bike thieves are in a certain town.

What typically ends up happening is you get robbed, you put your bike on my system, somebody eventually finds it and says, hey, Jack, I think I found your bike.

It's with this guy.

And I chime in and say, oh, yeah, we've seen this guy a a million times.

I can't call the cops up and say, hey, X, Y, Z, the victim has to do it.

They're the ones that have suffered the crime.

They're the ones with the police report number.

But I can give them all this information that says, look, when you call, mention this name, tell me, Liz.

Like, we can sort of give them the information that sort of tips it from a, we're just going to take your report to like, oh, no, we actually have warrants on that guy.

Let's go get him.

As we found with the services, like, we, I mean, there's, I could show you dudes right now that we've, we've caught with multiple stolens and they just don't don't fucking care.

Like, nobody cares.

This is so frustrating to be, to be, to have all this evidence, to have all this proof that these are the guys and this is exactly where they live and all this sort of thing.

And then for the cops to be like, here's all their selfies with all the incriminating stuff in the background.

Here's like a giant neon sign that says, let's do crime.

I mean, yeah,

they're not.

smart.

It's pretty, it's like fish in a barrel, but it's just really aggravating.

Why is there a problem here?

I don't know.

The answer is because there's no system in place to do anything about it.

There's a police system.

There's a law system.

Yeah, there is a police system.

There is a law system.

They'll all tell you we're swamped.

This lower stuff is not important.

But also, like, if we tip off a cop and say, this guy has hundreds of thousands of dollars of stolen shit, go get him.

And they decide, yeah, this is a guy we actually want.

He's in our, like, we're, we're, we've actually been looking for him.

Let's go do a raid.

Let's go seize everything.

He still has his offer up account.

Police don't call off rep and say, fuck this guy.

He's a bad guy.

Don't let him on him.

There's no, There's no mechanism there.

We gave up.

We completely just said, fuck it.

It's this clear that these people are operating in bad faith.

They make money off of all the stolen goods.

So we just started routing every single victim to the state attorney general.

We're like, file a complaint.

We get thousands of people filing complaints.

Eventually

this fucking attorney general will get off his ass and actually do something about it.

But

do not engage with OfferUp or Facebook Marketplace or wherever your stolen stuff is listed.

Do not engage with their systems because all they will do is nothing.

Or maybe they'll disable account for a little while.

Like we, we found a dude here selling drugs and he had a stolen bike that was taken from a cancer victim, a 65-year-old cancer victim.

It was a blue tern.

That I went and did a repo with some of the local guys here.

And like that guy's account is still active.

Like he was selling drugs on the platform and had the stolen bike.

And we popped it back from him.

And we sent in things saying, this is a bad guy.

He had this thing.

He stole from a fucking cancer victim.

His account's still there.

There's no mechanism in place to take these bad guys off.

And it's like, you know, I get it.

There's bigger problems in the world, right?

Like, this is, this is a pretty much, it just sucks when

like, we're doing them a favor, you know?

It's like, you'd think you would want to take the, the arsonist, rapist, murderer, like thieving, like those super, super bad guys that we are encountering and telling you about.

You'd think you'd want to do something about that.

And the answer is, no, we don't.

What's crazy is when somebody reports a stolen bike to the police, the police police will often say, go register your bike at bikeindex.org.

But then when bike index tells the police, like, hey, we found the thief, the police just ignore them.

So like, we have some Canadian partners that are phenomenal.

And I,

not to.

Not to stereotype, but they're super nice and they do their job and they're like, they're just really great and they're really engaged and they're really nice people.

And then we deal with, you know, unnamed American cities here that just don't give a fuck.

Like they just, you can't be bothered.

It's night and day.

So we do have some people and we do have some like we do have some specific officers who are typically bike people themselves who are like triathletes or they ride you know competitively or they were like downhill guys so you get these little onesie twosies but like organizationally yeah no nobody cares and so this is where your service becomes even more important because it's like this is this is vigilante

yeah i mean some some of it is not some of it is super easy some of it is just like hey this idiot kid bought your bike thinking he could make a profit off of it.

We feel fine telling you, go meet up with this kid and just kind of verbally smack him around a little bit and tell him not to be an idiot.

Get your bike back.

But then we also advise people like, no, we look this guy up.

He murdered someone.

Like, you should let this bike go.

This is one that you should just take the L on and take your insurance.

But like, you do not want to go meet up with this dude and knock on his front door because he killed somebody.

The way the site works is victims will put the details of their bike in the database, like the color, the description, the serial number, anything you got.

Photos of it are even good too.

And then they'll leave the contact details, email, and sometimes phone to text.

If you see my bike, let me know.

But the system is set up so Brian can see all the emails that get sent through the site.

So he can just chime in every now and then and add anything he might know about this.

So I'm sitting in my basement in 2020.

I'm working.

I'm writing out COVID.

I'm kind of bored.

It's a lot of time to kill in the summer of 2020.

And this email comes in.

Hello, my name is Blank.

I'm a cyclist from Mexico.

I'm truly sorry to inform you that your bike is in Mexico.

The bike is being sold with a Facebook page, and they link this construme.

Here you will find your bike with the Fox Transfer Seat post in a recent post.

I hope this information helps you.

I've sent lots of messages to other reports on this page.

This MoFo sell only stolen bikes and all are from your area.

Hope you can recover.

The victim had their bike stolen in the Bay Area, which is near San Francisco, California.

And his stolen bike was for sale in Mexico on Facebook.

And that wasn't the only email.

Brian saw five other emails from the same guy messaging different victims, letting them all know their bike was now for sale in Mexico.

And this was strange for Brian.

He hasn't seen these things go across the border like that before.

You know, we've seen them go cross-border every now and then, but to have five of them, like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, all from the same place, all from the same area.

And

the minute we looked at this guy it was just

match match match match match match what he means is he looked at the guy's other listings he had other bikes for sale too and as brian searched bike index he found hit after hit it wasn't just five bikes there were a lot of stolen bikes for sale on this facebook page and they were all stolen from the bay area So one of the people who had their bikes stolen messaged this Facebook seller in Mexico like, hey, jerk, you have my stolen bike.

Give it back.

And the seller did this thing on Facebook where you can region lock your

you can basically say i only want to let people in these countries be able to see my page so this guy was like crap i've got these americans pissed off at me he region locked it to mexico so for a while brian thought the guy shut the listing down because they weren't viewable anymore But then someone got the idea to use a VPN, connect into Mexico, and see if they can still see the listings.

And yes, the bikes were still listed for sale.

And they saw there were even more bikes listed at this point.

And those were stolen from the Bay Area, too.

We were just getting our heads around, like, what, what is this?

Like, is this guy the, is he actually coming up here and robbing these people?

Is he like, like, who is this guy?

Like, why does he have so many?

Like, and it just kicked off this whole series of dominoes that just the next four years of my life was, that's what I did.

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Brian is tuned into this guy on Facebook selling all these stolen bikes.

He wants to know more.

So we're looking at this guy and we're looking at his webpage and it's tons and tons and tons of bikes, but we can also see tons and tons and tons of prior sales.

Okay, so that's a Facebook marketplace?

It's no, it's just a Facebook page.

It is not a business page.

It's just like you and I would have our own page, but it's the name of this guy's business, which is called Construmark.

The page had thousands of posts, most of which were bicycles, and so many of them were coming back as stolen, all from the Bay Area.

This was going to be a lot of data to go through.

There was me, and there were some of the victims, and there were some people in the Bay Area that also work in stolen bikes.

So we threw up like a Google Doc and we started just sort of tracking like, here's his Facebook posts, here's his social media, here's his Instagram.

Like, one of the guys was able to sneak into his Instagram by pretending to be somebody else.

We now have access to that.

And, like, just basically getting our heads around, like, who is this dude?

Where does he operate?

What's his name?

Like, where's he advertising?

Is it all stolen?

Like, is it all from the same place?

Like, just sort of doing some initial.

And we, we had done a real small dossier where we took like, I think, like, his first 50 bikes and we matched like 12 or 15 of them to the Bay Area.

And we were like, we're pretty sure the rest of these are also stolen.

They're just not in bike index.

But can we, we made this zip file in a Google link.

We passed it around to a bunch of people in the Bay Area who are like shop owners and people that run stolen bike Google groups and other people who kind of chase bad guys.

And they were able to pull out more and be like, yeah, this one was from Oka.

I'm like, yeah, shit, this was like, they were able to get a bunch of matches we didn't know about.

So it just, this, it just kept getting more and more like everything this dude has is stolen.

And it sort of painted this picture of

like, this isn't a one-off.

This is like hit, hit, hit, hit, hit, hit, hit, hit, hit.

Oh, we didn't know about that one, but later on, it turned out that was a hit too.

Like, it just, it just sort of like fleshed out the picture for us of like, whoever this fucking dude is, he's the Kaiser Soze of stolen bikes because everything he has is stolen from one place.

But it is like

it draws a hundred mile radius around San Francisco.

It wasn't, it wasn't just Oakland.

It wasn't just Marin.

It wasn't just just San Jose.

It was Santa Cruz.

It was this very big footprint, which we typically, that's kind of nuts.

You sold thousands on there?

I think, yeah, I think it was like 800 something a week locked.

The thing is,

so we looked from like 20, 20, 20 on.

Going back, you could see he'd been operating since 2015.

But we basically had to say, like,

we can't care about this stuff.

We got to care about the stuff that's current that we can call victims right now, that we can try to get cops engaged on.

But we can see all this shit.

We can see how big of an operation this guy has had for so long,

which is alarming.

As they start to piece this together, they're seeing that this guy sometimes lists a dozen bikes for sale a day in Mexico.

And they could tie it back to there being a dozen bikes stolen in the Bay Area.

So what's going on here?

This guy probably isn't the one going to San Francisco, robbing people there, and then taking the bikes all the way to Mexico to sell it to people there.

They thought he must be the tail end of some operation.

But what operation?

Who are the people stealing bikes and where do they go after that?

And how do they end up in Mexico?

Like, is there some big-ass truck driving across the border like every day loaded with stolen bikes?

And they want to be careful in their investigation too, so they can have a good chance of catching the right guys.

If they simply call up the Mexican police to say, hey, arrest this guy down here, it might not stop the thefts happening in the Bay Area, or those thieves might get away.

So the plan was to figure out everyone involved and to build an airtight case against them all to hopefully get the police to take them all down at once.

So every day I would wake up and I would, we had, we had basically archived as much as we could at that point.

So what we were interested in was the new stuff, like what's what's he got that's new.

And that was kind of hard to tell because he's, he's, he's a very, he's very good at marketing and he's very, he'll post 10 things a day and sometimes they're repeats.

And it's sort of like you see a bike that you've seen for four or five weeks that he's not get rid of, but then this brand new one pops up and you say, okay, well, that's, that's the one we care about.

That's, that's the one we haven't already tried to investigate.

He would post a bike.

We would find it in bike index.

We would call the owner.

We'd back and forth with them a little bit and say, like, tell me about this.

Like, was this a robbery?

Was there footage?

Was it cameras?

Was it, was anybody assaulted?

Like, was this one of those

Oakland had this series of armed bike jackings where they would literally pull in front of guys on bikes with guns and say, get off the fucking bike and rob them and take the bike and throw it in the car and leave.

So some of these were violent crimes.

And the reason we're asking is because, you you know, if a bike gets stolen off the street, nobody cares.

Somebody sticks a gun in your face and takes a bike, you're going to get police assistance.

So we were trying to sort of cherry-pick, like, let's find the ones where there's surveillance.

Let's find the ones where it's high dollar.

Let's find the one if there was an assault.

Let's find the ones that you can actually pick up the phone and get somebody to care about.

So we call, and these calls sucked because

I could see it and I wanted to tell them about it, but I didn't want them

to do what the first guy had did, which is confront this guy and blow it up again.

So I would just tell them, look, I'm with Bike Index.

I think I'm looking at a picture of your stolen bike being sold online, but I want to know some more information.

I'm curious about timing.

How long does it take between when a bike gets stolen and when it goes up for sale?

We would see bikes that were stolen within a day or two getting advertised on this shithead's Facebook page.

But we would see it in a visual setting that looked like America.

And it's hard to explain this.

Not that there's like apple pie and and flags in the background, but like

the ground looks a certain way, the buildings look a certain way.

And if you look at Mexico, like it's shitty concrete, and it just, there's a feel to it.

Yeah, absolutely.

I watch a lot of the geo-guessers.

Yes.

Yes.

We would see a place that just looked like an American setting, and we knew that it had only been like a day.

So we're like, it's probably still in America.

But then two weeks later, he'd be advertising the same bike for sale, but it would be in a very Mexico.

It would be in his front lawn and it with like, Vival Mexico, you you know, like like very, very obviously clear with people's fucking license plates with the, you know, the crazy different like, so it was like robbery already appears for sale, but it's in America.

Two, three weeks later, it's advertised again, but it's clearly in Mexico.

Rinse, cycle, repeat.

Geo-guessing is really fun.

I sometimes find myself playing it for hours.

Basically, it's a game where you're dropped in a random Google Street View somewhere in the world and you need to look around to try to guess where you are in the world.

And I watch other geo-guessers and some are insanely good.

They seem to know what every mountain and river looks like in the world, but they use a lot of well-known clues, like how power poles look is different from country to country.

And the soil color and the types of plants and the shapes of the street signs and mile markers look different in every country.

These all seem to be dead giveaways to determine where that photo was taken in the world.

So while it seems strange to think a photo is American or Mexican, it's actually not.

There's a lot of clues that you can use to figure it out.

They tried examining the metadata of the photos posted to Facebook too.

See, when you take a photo, your camera often adds a ton of identifying information in the photo.

It'll list the type of camera, the time of day it was taken, and if your camera is GPS enabled, it might include GPS coordinates in the photo's metadata.

But all these photos were posted to Facebook.

And Facebook learned pretty quickly to scrub all the metadata out of photos to avoid stalking.

So there was really nothing to look at there.

Now, as Brian talked with people who were getting their bikes stolen in the Bay Area, he was telling them, hey, open a police report, but give the police my contact information so I can show them some evidence that I'm seeing on my side.

You know, I got a very small handful of phone calls, and it was some sergeant somewhere, some poor schmuck who had like 800 other burglary cases.

And he's like, your victim says you know where this is?

And I'm like, yes, it's in La Barca, Jalisco, Mexico.

And he would go, ha,

and that would be the end of that phone call.

You know, and they were like, they were, they weren't dicks.

They were cordial about it, but it was like, that's gone.

That's out of my league.

That's like, you know, we're not Interpol.

Like, it's not a huge surprise.

Pretty cool service you got there.

Thanks for calling.

And it was that for like a fucking year.

But Brian knew it was just a numbers game.

If he kept getting victims to report their stolen bikes and attach Brian's name and number, at some point, some cop who might have had their own bike stolen or something like that would want to get this case solved.

So he kept trying to get victims to get cops to call him.

Eventually, it landed with the right.

There's a guy who's pretty key in all this, a San Francisco police burglary detective guy, who was like,

your name came across my desk that you know where all these bikes are going.

I have all these burglary cases.

Like, can you tell me about this a little bit?

And that is what kicked off at least a discussion with someone who actually cared, who was like, yeah, I have an interest in knowing, like, because he was also also kind of plugged into like the bad guys in the Bay Area.

And he, you know, he had an interest in like, just tell me what you see.

So he told the police everything he knew at the time.

And this time, they were listening and wanted to stay in touch and continue feeding them information.

And Brian kept looking for more information about the guys selling bikes in Mexico.

I refer to this guy as the Ossent Peñata because the minute you poke at him, like literally everything falls out.

He's a cyclist, so his name is all over the place.

One of the cycling places like lists his birthday, so we know his birthday.

He's very,

I almost said vain, but he just posts a lot on social media.

He would include a lot of interior shots of his place.

He would include pictures of his cars, license plates.

The way he was selling

these bikes on his Facebook page were just, he would just like put up his banking numbers because that's how we'd get paid.

He's like, oh yeah, I'm at HSBC.

Here's my routing number.

Here's my phone number.

Here's my WhatsApp.

It was like, because he was so good at promotion, he just gave us

everything and he he has a construction business so he's simple he's like into bikes but he's running this construction business so there's osin's on the construction business the osin's on the bike thing he's he's putting his phone numbers out there he's putting his whatsapps out there he's you know blogging about his sister's store and and it's just It's very open.

If you look at something long enough and hard enough, especially for years, and you have an interest in picking it apart and finding the little details in the background.

So we would see things like

he had like somebody bring a truckload of stuff to his

house once and it was bikes and they were advertising it and they took pictures of all the bikes, but there were reflections on the windshield.

So you could see the guy who drove the car.

We're like, okay, who's this fucking guy?

He has a lot of women sort of associated with him.

He's, you know, he's got a wife and he's got some sisters and he's got some other, they're big families and we're like,

Who the hell are all these women?

Like, we don't know, we just know first names.

And then they went to Disneyland and they all bought shirts that said, like, you know, mother, father, uncle, aunt, like, and they stood in this big family picture, and it was like, oh, thank you, you moron.

You just gave me your family tree.

Now we know that who these women are.

Like, because they have the same last name, but we don't know if it's because of marriage or because of familial.

And then they all got in this big photo together.

And it was like, aunt, uncle, brother, mom, like, grandma.

And I was like, oh, thank you.

So we did a little work on that.

At a certain point, we knew, okay, the way the system works, stolen in America, stashed somewhere in America, advertised in Mexico.

Somebody sticks them on a truck, then they go to Mexico and eat advertising them there.

And so, all these pictures we were seeing in the American space, we were scrutinizing.

Like, they would screw up and they would sort of shoot it at such an angle that you kind of see down the street.

So, we're like, what kind of trees are we seeing?

Is this westward facing?

Is this?

And they would screw up and they would put pictures of there's like some industrial crap, like paint, paint thinner,

just shit that you would have in like a like a really industrial type setting.

But we were like, okay, what is this brand?

Is it in Spanish?

We're trying to pick apart every little detail.

So after a year of investigating this guy, they knew everything about him.

His name was Ricardo Estrada Zamora.

And they seem to know a lot about what's going on in Mexico, but still very little about what's going on in the U.S.

They could see sort of the edges and the outline of it, but not the details.

They thought thieves must be stealing bikes, and then it would end up in some central place in the Bay Area where some photos were taken.

And the bikes would initially get listed.

And then someone would run the truck of bikes down to Ricky in Mexico.

And by this point, there are more victims joining the investigation, an army of helpers, practically.

People putting trackers on bikes and letting them get stolen to see where they'd end up.

And people trying to find truckloads of bikes crossing the border, which is actually still a mystery to Brian.

How did the bikes get to Mexico and how often were they driven down there?

That's an unknown to me.

I know there's a ton of services that do.

So there's like, once you start digging into this, there's like a billion one little regional shipping.

Like there's one in Sonora, there's one in Baja, there's one in like, there's all these weird little, little regional shippers.

I know from having personally driven through the San Diego border, it's like you don't even stop.

It's a four-lane highway that you just blow through and you're supposed to pull into the tax thing, but you don't have to.

Cause a lot of Americans go down to Baja, they go to Rosarito, they go to whatever.

And like, I've driven that, that border through Tijuana for work and it it is literally just a four.

You're like, do I have to stop at a checkbox?

Oh, shit, I'm in Mexico.

Like, you just boom in.

Like, so you see people taking stuff in there.

So

that's an unknown to me.

And I hope that actually comes out in this legal process, but because I do have some questions.

But what

we surmised was every two to three weeks, a truckload, and a truckload is about 15 to 20 bikes.

So at one point, after watching and watching and waiting and watching and not really getting any breaks, we got one stupid break.

He posted a bike and it was the usual 30 crop of pictures.

And then one of those pictures was, and this took me a while to pick apart.

When you organize things on your iPhone and you make folders, and so I have a folder that's like dogs, a folder that's like running, a folder that's like bikes, and you classify the stuff in there.

If you look at it in that folder, it puts the name of the folder at the top of the phone.

So he saw this weird picture that didn't look like the rest.

And it looked like he had accidentally taken a screenshot of the phone, not like the picture itself.

And it had a name, a very unique name at the top of that

phone, of that picture, which meant he had a folder that had that very unique name, which meant

there's probably one of his followers that has a name like that.

So we looked at his followers.

We found a guy with that name.

That guy guy was located in San Jose.

He ran a, I think he still runs a, like a, like a transmission shop, like a car shop.

And the first thing I see when I open up this car shop's Facebook page is this San Jose asshole with a bunch of bikes and the same visual settings that we've been seeing in all these American ads, wondering where the hell it is.

We see the same, and it wasn't immediate, but it was,

it was, hey, it's an industrial setting.

And then we went to like Bing Macs, Google Maps, and we were looking at this like

metal, shitty, corrugated siding.

I'm like, that looks like the thing.

The color's right.

The setting is right.

The angles are right.

And then he had a bunch of interior shots of his shop.

So transmissions are these big, heavy, you know, they're like the size of golden retrievers and they weigh 380 pounds and it is big.

So he has these big industrial orange racks that are made for, they're very distinct looking.

They just, they're not like something you and I would have in our house because they're big, they're meant to carry these big, heavy, scary things.

They're painted this bright fire engine, like orange.

And similarly, we had seen one other photo fuck up and a crop of one of the bikes that was advertised in America.

They shot, instead of putting it against a wall and shooting it so it was sort of blank and you couldn't see anything, they put it up against this like completely weird-looking orange industrial rack that had this metal thing on it that I did not realize at the time was a transmission.

But once you started looking, it was like boom, boom, like same guy, same visual setting, same corrugated walls, same color scheme.

He's got all these bikes.

We found pictures of him with the Mexican kingpin guy, like having lunch in San Jose.

Here we are riding at Allen Park.

It was just domino, domino, domino, domino, domino.

That was his guy.

This was the U.S.

contact that was collecting and staging stolen bikes before loading them up and sending them to Mexico.

Finally, the U.S.

side of the operation was revealing itself.

They even had someone go to the site at 2 a.m.

to verify this is the place that all the U.S.

photos are coming from.

This is our guy.

This is the guy.

This is where they're going.

This is where they're being kept.

This is where they're being packaged.

This is where they're being photographed.

We don't know what happens in between the other two, but this is his guy.

And 40 minutes later, he had realized what he had done and he removed that one single photo from his listing.

So it was just this tiny window of time.

That if I had not eaten my bagel faster that morning and not logged in at that exact point, and not just if my day had panned out any differently, I probably would have missed it because we were in the middle of talking about it.

We were excited.

We're on Slack.

You know, we're talking about like, this is the guy I was trading.

And we go back and like, oh, yeah, go here.

He has this picture.

And they would go back and reload it.

And they reloaded it, and that picture was gone.

But I had already screenshot it.

So it was this very small, very lucky, like, like complete OSINT win, right?

Like, complete just human error.

Look at it long enough, somebody's going to trip up.

And he did.

Well, this new piece of information was absolutely something the California police could work with.

They executed a search warrant on that guy in San Jose, found everything they were expecting to find.

And according to the indictment, also like 206 grand in a bag.

So they found bikes packaged up for sale.

They found, I think they listed nine specific bikes or something like that.

They caught them completely red-handed.

It was sort of a slam dunk.

We think, yay, go us.

Awesome.

Like, and that, this is where this story kind of bifurcates because now you have this guy in San Jose who's fucked.

That case got kicked up to the FBI, I think, because of the cross-border nature of the crime, or maybe because of the money, but it went into federal hands, not local SFPD hands.

So now it becomes a federal case, and you can read the indictments and their bananas.

But the second sort of winding path is it does not even touch this guy in Mexico.

He just switches his supply to San Diego.

He's got another one of those guys somewhere else.

Oh, what?

How is this operation still going on?

Ricky Zamora was still getting stolen bikes, but now they're getting sourced from San Diego.

Looking back at all the stolen bikes Ricky was selling before, none of them were coming from San Diego before.

So whatever is going on here now is a new operation.

And U.S.

police don't have a way to arrest him in Mexico.

And for some reason, they can't get him kicked off facebook either so the operation still goes on now with bikes being stolen from san diego so we do exactly the same exercise but we do it in san diego and we don't get any traction whatsoever there they they tighten up at that point they realize blank wall blank setting no slip-ups no osin mess ups we try for four months to get uh police there involved and including like sending them excel sheets of like here's the ninety thousand dollars worth of bikes that we see that he has here are the police report numbers for your jurisdiction here are the victim names can you please subpoena facebook just do your job

and we just we just never got any traction it just never happened and then we saw his focus this is where i absolutely lost my we start seeing bikes from bend oregon we start seeing bikes from salem oregon i start seeing bikes from portland brian lives in portland oregon a very bike friendly city and since brian is so involved with the bike scene he has a lot of cyclist friends.

And now he's seeing some of his friends or people his friends know as becoming victims in this investigation.

Is there a new operation somewhere in Portland in his backyard?

I start seeing bikes with stickers of bike shops that I have friends at, that I've been to, that I've bought bikes from.

There was a victim that lost a titanium Linsky that

I talked to her a little bit and it wound up with this prick in Mexico and I friended her on Facebook.

We have friends in common.

I have a question about San Francisco still.

When these guys got busted there, did that result in fewer bikes getting stolen?

The way it works is there's all these burglary crews in the Bay Area and they're typically younger guys that are run by an older captain.

Captain's got the car, he handles the money, he does the recon, and they just run around robbing.

shit.

They're not robbing just for bikes.

They're robbing for whatever.

So they're robbing stores.

They're robbing homes.

They're robbing businesses.

They're robbing commercial.

They're robbing.

They're just burglars.

That's what they do.

They're not targeting any specific thing.

But they know,

okay, so we've done our robbing.

We're back at our Alibaba's cave, you know,

which is some shitty hotel that they're renting with all their stolen stuff in it.

If you get jewelry, it goes to this guy.

If you get guns, we fence it with this guy.

If you get electronics, we fence it over here.

And if you get bikes, you go to this guy.

That's the guy that we found.

So it was multiple different burglary crews whose job is not go get bikes.

It's just go steal whatever the hell you can steal steal, and we'll put it on the black market.

But if they had bikes, this is the guy that they went to.

We actually have some fucking hilarious surveillance where, like, we actually, one of these guys

scales a fence, drops down the other side of the fence, and he stands up and he brushes himself off and he makes the sign of the cross as a good luck charm, and then he goes in and robs the house, all caught on camera.

But we would see it's fat guy, short guy, little guy.

It's 101 different dudes, and it's not the dude that is running this transmission shop.

So we, and we had some other means by which we pieced some of this together.

So the bike thieves had to just find a different place to sell their bikes to, and they can continue their operation.

And it sounds like they were just a bunch of random burglars who all knew that if they had bikes, they could just sell it to this guy real quick.

Another pipeline of stolen bikes they saw pop up during this time was between Colorado and Juarez, Mexico.

Apparently, there were thieves in Colorado who would steal bikes and then ship them to Jures to sell.

But this was a totally different group compared to what Brian was tracking with the San Francisco and San Diego thieves.

At one point, Ricky Estrada Zamora, kingpin of the Labarca fencing operation, is now listing bikes from guys that I see in Juarez, that I know are bad guys that are involved in this sort of Colorado pipeline, meaning his supply went from Bear Area to San Diego to Oregon, all the way back to Colorado through these guys in jarez so so the way this manifested was i was talking to a guy in colorado got robbed i'm like yeah there's these like five dicks down in juarez that sell a lot of stolen like oh look he's got it here's your bike call your guy and this is a bad guy and he's a he's a i know that he's a bad guy and there's this very specific setting that he takes a picture of them in more ocean work and here's his name we're trying to get laredo pd to give a about him but like just just like go

here's your information packet like good good luck and i open up rookie's page and i'm looking at the same photo because he's like doing consignment sales.

He's, he's using these guys.

And we're, so it's like

his reach is, is

amazing.

Like, I really hand it to the guy.

He's, he's got an endless well of supply.

Um,

so it now, as we sit here, you know, uh, October 17th of 2024, the vast majority of what he's sourcing is Colorado.

It's all coming out of Colorado because there's just endless supply there.

It's frustrating that the biggest seller of stolen U.S.

bicycles has been operating since 2015 without getting into any trouble.

The FBI indictment only listed the name of the U.S.

guy who owned the transmission shop.

It didn't list Ricky Zamora's name in it at all.

It just says an unindicted co-conspirator in Mexico.

The Mexican authorities haven't arrested him.

He continues to sell stolen bikes on Facebook.

After the FBI published their indictment, Wired published an article telling the story as well.

And shout out to Christopher Solomon, the reporter for Wired, for doing such a great job on that story.

And then other outlets, LA Times and PR's Planet Money, it got a lot of coverage.

And every step of the way, we thought, surely

at some point now, someone in Facebook will get it together and just nuke this guy's page.

Surely after a federal indictment, this will stick a fork in the sky.

No.

Surely after a Wired article, no.

Surely after the LA Times, no.

Surely after Planet Money, no.

Maybe fucking Darknet Diaries will do it.

Like, my God, but like, he still has his Facebook page going.

Yeah, he's selling yesterday.

He's still listing bikes.

He's still making a profit.

No one has touched him.

He posted, there's this, I can send you a screenshot of it.

He posted this big blanket denial that was sort of like, are you familiar with the term Darvo?

It's the deny, accused, reverse victim offender.

He basically said, like, this journalist and Wired gets $5 every time someone reads the article he's made millions of dollars it's yellow it's completely unhinged it makes no sense but it's basically like he denies everything he says it's bullshit but he provides no proof and all these people that were showing up in his comments saying well what about this bike and that was stolen he just deletes them he just whitewashes the whole thing So it, you know, we like, I get it.

I can't buy a cruise missile and take this dude out.

I can't.

I'm not Rambo.

I'm not going to go down there.

He's going to do what he's going to do.

I just, we just wanted him to stop, right?

We wanted him to not have a a platform that actively turns a blind eye to this guy being the most colossal fencing dick of all time, making millions of dollars.

And we know that because we clocked it.

We just thought, you know, and we had many conversations.

We tried the stupid Facebook reporting, which does nothing.

Because a lot of the bike index people are in the Bay Area, they work, they know a lot of meta people.

They ride with them.

We had personal contacts, personal friends.

Our shtick has always been: we can find a cyclist that we can talk to in this organization.

We're Sympatico, you me, you me, same, same.

We're all friends.

That's how we get shit done.

And every single person that we talked at, either officially or unofficially, was just like, we are completely incapable of doing anything about this.

There is no mechanism in place.

Or they would say something like, I put it up the chain internally.

Thanks.

And it was not only meta, it was companies that have been picked up by meta that are now part of the metafold.

It was, I had an engineer, I sort of ranted about this in one of my talks who was basically, you know, I had this long back and forth with this guy here's my proof here's my Excel sheets download a zip file here's a fucking indictment like like proof proof proof proof proof proof proof can you please

just kick this guy off your platform and he said no and I said why and he's like I'm like what is the bar really that high he's like yes and I'm like then I don't understand does he have to shoot someone in the face like what what's it gonna take and we sort of got you know we were cordial but we were like sort of talking about the problem and it was like he's like, you know, we have all this AI-generated crap.

We have these cell phones.

We have people, like, like, there's just so much fraud.

There's just so much badness.

Like, we're really hoping to tackle this with artificial intelligence.

And I was like, fuck you, buddy.

Like, we're giving you actual priceless intell, like, intelligence that is backed by proof, that is backed by indictments, that is backed by screenshots, that is backed by hunt.

Like, I could put you on a conference call of 150 victims right now.

I'm giving you actual intelligence.

Just do your job.

And he's like, well, we're really hoping to tackle this with AI.

And

it's an insult.

It's just a complete joke.

Nobody's driving that bus.

Hasn't Google, because Google has all these bikes on campus and Facebook has all these guys, and you could just borrow them and use them and leave them.

Why don't these guys just get wiped out like every day that they do?

They do.

We've actually talked to some of those corporate systems.

They're run through.

I'm not going to go down this rabbit hole, but

other companies that have the same thing in play, they do.

They get half their fleet stolen.

So you'd think, oh, hey, you know, all those bikes that just got stolen from your campus?

Yeah.

This is the guy on your page that's reselling them.

I don't think they would care.

At least, yeah, you know, I don't know.

You know, like, I say this a lot, like, on the list of bad things that we could be sitting here talking about Facebook, ranging from

psychological manipulation, illegal data, you know, voter manipulation, child sexual abuse, drug dealing,

like bikes is pretty low on that, on that totem pole, right?

Like, like, I, and I get that.

Bike Index has recovered over $27 million worth of bicycles, which means they recovered around 15,000 stolen bicycles.

And it continues to serve as a wonderful tool to help people when no one else seems to want to help.

And personally, I think it's a great place to practice OSINT skills.

I went on offer-up in my area and saw which bikes were for sale, and I tried to go on bikeindex.org to see if any of them matched.

Cereals Serials often aren't listed in the listing, but as your eyes adjust to the place, you start to notice things.

Listings with sketchy looking photos, descriptions lacking specifics, or if the description says missing battery or missing key.

It's kind of a clue.

And you take the description of the bike and see if you can find a similar bike on BikeIndex.

I spent an hour doing this and I found a bike that I thought was a match.

It was the same color, same model, same year.

And the seller said they bought it at an auction and don't know anything about the bike.

So I emailed the victim, but they wrote back and said, no, that one's not exactly mine.

He had some way of identifying it, I guess.

But there is something exciting about this process of bike hunting.

The reward is you could help someone find their stolen bike, which is a great feeling.

And all the info is out there.

It's just up to someone to go find it.

And it helps your community if you stop a bike thief in your area.

And you could take this to another level, too, and start looking at other listings that user might have and try to pinpoint exactly where they are, who they are, and see if they're selling a ton of stolen stuff.

You might find a bunch of other stolen bikes and learn about that person's identity facebook stalking a bike thief is a wild ride if you want to get into osint and like a challenge this is a fertile space try to search facebook marketplace craigslist or offer up for bikes for sale and then cross-reference that with bike index and you might help someone recover their own bike and and while this story is about bicycles it could easily be about stand-up paddle boards or guitars or anything that's high value which has a serial number and i'm not sure if those sites exist but if they don't someone needs to make one it's still incredible to have this sort of reputation that you've done all this good in the world.

It is a zero billion dollar a year industry.

It is not putting food on the table.

Karmically, it feels really good, but it is exhausting.

And I got super burned out.

And at the end of the day, like, you know, this guy's still doing his thing.

So did I really change anything?

Yes or no?

Oh, and if you're wondering what's a good bike lock to keep your bike safe these days, Brian says it doesn't even matter.

If a thief wants it, they'll get it.

They either use a giant pry bar to pop the lock, or like down here in Portland, you'll see those blue, there's tubes that they're called staple racks.

They're just the racks that go in the ground.

They don't even bother with the bike lock.

They cut the rack in two because the rack steel is only that thin.

So you can basically go to Home Depot and get a tool or a saw that just goes

right through the rack.

So they don't bother defeating a lock.

They don't defile it.

They just cut, they just go down a line of the racks, go

remove the tube, pull the bike out, throw it in the truck.

So, I guess the advice is to really just take your bike with you wherever you go.

Like, some apartments have bike rooms where it's in a parking garage somewhere, and they tell you, hey, store your bike in there.

But even there, that's not safe because at 2 a.m., thieves could break into the bike room and spend hours unloading bikes and cutting locks.

Because sometimes those bike rooms are so far deep in the parking garage or so far away that they can make as much noise as they want and nobody will hear it.

So, parking your bike inside your home or apartment is the best option.

But even there, it's not entirely safe.

The current situation sucks.

And all I could say is, fuck bike thieves.

Thanks to Brian Hantz for sharing this story with us.

Bikeindex.org is a non-profit and ran by volunteers.

So if you think it's a good service, maybe donate to them to show your appreciation.

This episode was created by me, the spoke joker, Jackie Sider.

Our editor is the ghost rider, rider, Tristan Ledger, mixing by proximity sound, intro music by the mysterious brake master cylinder.

What do Linux users and cyclists have in common?

They both worry about drivers.

This is Darknet Diaries.