Chicago area bike stores getting robbed.
 

Wow,

Sorry to hear that.

A smart thief would strip the components, and the frames would end up in Lake Michigan. Components shipped out of state and put up on E-Bay.

It sounds like some of the shops have had repeated incidents.

Have the thieves cased the shops? I suppose after a while they'd be able to anticipate general organization of shops, even without a lot of casing inside them.

Why don't they put in "Bait Bikes"?

I suppose if a shop has 100 bikes, it would be hard to put in 100 trackers. But, with a little research, they could likely predict the 10 bikes that would be most likely hit. Build some "eye-catchers", and put them on solitary display racks.

Track the bikes back to the lair. Perhaps do some surveillance, and take down the entire distribution system.

> $100K in thefts. A few people involved. They could be looking at multiple felonies. Served sequentially, and the thieves could be locked up for a very long time.

Wow, they are really slamming those delicate road bikes on the ground in that video. They must be stripping them to have such little care for the condition of the bikes. Wheel sets and handlebars could be toast, and huge scratches on frames.

Not headline news worthy, but I personally know of a fellow taken out and his bike stolen while riding a Chicago bike path. Some areas you simply just don't go.

I think the story had a typo. It said some of the bikes are worth $10,000 a piece. Think they meant retail for!

Yeah, this would be very simple. Take a super-high-end bike, put a tracking device in the seat tube. Seems like it would work

Question is, then what? May as well just give them the bike.

By the time the process is done, someone will blame the whole thing on bike privilege.

Yup,.......now that bikes are priced so high, Not much can stop a thief from temptation, that's just a pane of glass and a quick ride away......

As there is no C&V content, this thread has been moved to General Cycling Discussion.

Thieves only steal what has immediate cash value from fences or those pre-inclined to buy hot goods.
Don't buy stolen merchandise and there is no incentive for thieves to steal it.
Who is the source of this problem?
Buyers of stolen goods.

"Psst, hey buddy...."

-Bandera

[QUOTE=RobbieTunes;20785762]Question is, then what? May as well just give them the bike.

/QUOTE]

Bobby, pretty straightforward. Here are two products that may work. https://thelightbug.com/ and https://www.verifir.com/

Those bikes are not fenced locally or disassembled and sold for parts.

High end goods get shipped overseas in containers - cars, motorcycles, laptops, etc. $10k Trek Madones and $8k Pivot Mach 5.5's are no different.

They get trucked to Newark or Long Beach, put on boats and are never seen again.


-Tim-

We've had a few smash and grabs like that in Tucson, but nothing for a while now. Maybe the shops around here have figured out how to minimize the potential.

One of the more benign homeless guys *, has taken up sleeping in the doorway @ the LBS, so the shop now has a night watcher,

and a shopping cart of his finds.. some of them bike parts ..

*Head injury, from working on the North slope oil pipeline..

https://www.oilandgasinvestor.com/si...amp=1509724171

Even my own local store is concerned of being targeted. They have a big metal cage preventing bad people from simply smashing the glass to get bike and even took extra steps to physically lock every high end bike up at night as well as during the day. :(

Very HANGRY junkyard dogs at that!

Around 2008 my shop was hit along with 2 other shops in the area, all on the same night. Certainly cased before the robbery as the perps took two very expensive mountain bikes and left the road bikes alone. In and out within seconds.

In 1995 we were hit by some guy in a pickup. He rammed the front of the store and loaded two kids bikes into the truck. The bakery across the street saw it all happen around 4am. The was caught within 24 hours. That is only part of the story. If you need to know the rest, PM me.

Somebody, somewhere knows something.

When I rode motorcycles I had a pair of BMWs. Used parts were obtainable if you knew where to look and needed certain parts, but we never had the worries that riders did with other brands as there wasn't much of a market for stolen bikes or parts.

Of course, the theives don't like being out in the open for long, but if it takes about a minute to defeat the best hardened steel U-Lock, how long would it take to disassemble a window grate with handheld tools, and 2 or 3 people working on it?

The video clip above talks about installing a gate over the door.

https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...bb38d42742.jpg

Do the store owners know anything about bike thieves and locks? Does the store sell bike locks?

It should take a skilled thief about 5 seconds to go through that lock and open the gate. Knocking out window glass would take longer than the lock. Bulletproof glass? Tempered glass? Laminated Glass? Wired Glass?

Locking bicycles wheel to wheel? That will slow the thieves down if they're riding the bikes, but one clip seems to show a thief carrying 2 bikes off somewhere. In fact, how many bikes are chained together? Perhaps take off a couple of wheels and pull out bike in pairs, some with extra wheels.

They need better information about where the bikes go after they leave the shop. Pickup? Van? Rental? Stolen Vehicle? Stolen Plates? Apparently no videos taken outside of the stores.

It is a tough situation, no doubt about it. But, I'm not convinced they're going far enough.

I'd start thinking of ways to keep the thieves in the store. How long? 5 minutes from entry to response? Getting them mad at your store may not be good, but they'd be liable for any damages the courts could recoup.

Of course, they may not be putting the whole story on TV either.