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news
High tech thief warning as £1.8m of bikes stolen in Lancashire
Lancashire Police have warned cyclists that their bikes may be at risk without extra security measures, saying that more than £1.8m worth of bikes have been stolen in the county in the last year.
3,852 bikes were taken, and the officers investigating say that the higher value thefts may have been using data from exercise apps like Strava to identify where they were kept.
Cars with bike racks were also being followed home, to be targeted later on.
Sgt Kirstie Whyatt, based at Bispham Police station, near Blackpool, told the Express: "We are looking closely at the apps and phoning victims to see if they might have been using them.
"We are also considering whether thieves are looking out for cars with bike carriers."
She added: "This is a big problem across Lancashire. What has become clear is the way criminals are changing their behaviour.
"They are not taking any old bike. They are after cycles of high value.
"In the town centre we're still seeing people cutting chains and taking any bike but in residential areas they are breaking into sheds."
Bike theft expert officer Sgt Dave Sherrington, of Lancashire Police, said: "In 2015, 3,852 bicycles were reported stolen across Lancashire with a value of £1,813,511.
"This is only the thefts which were reported to police - we actually believe there are more thefts which remain unreported.
"It appears that the recent rise in the purchase of expensive high-tech bikes is fuelling the thefts - the most expensive bike stolen last year was worth over £10,000.
"We think that many of these thefts could have been prevented if owners had locked their bike up securely.”
At road.cc we want you to keep your trusty steed safe - so we’ve produced this guide to bike security.
And if you want our recommendations for the best locks your money can buy, click on over here.
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20 comments
Well I might not have any Strava stats to compare, but I do have a bike to ride on !
Don't start Strava from your doorstep.
Don't keep £3k+ bikes in a £200.00 shed.
Don't spend time showing expensive bikes off to all and sundry.
You only need to look at forums to see that there are plety of threads looking for bargains and plenty of classified ads sellin to good to be true equipment. Cyclists are providing the market, we are robbing ourselves.
I list my bikes as "red and White" and "Black " rather than the actual models on Strava.
The privacy setting also means you lose any Koms within the kilometre privacy area.
Unfortunately this was not a problem for me at all!
Nor me.
I do find though that having the privacy zone enabled shortens the ride when you upload it to Strava than what is reported on my computer.
I think that it doesn't count the privacy zone towards your total but I've never been able to find anything on the site to back that up.
Something similar is happening with cars.
The Mk2 Ford Focus RS is popular, and thieves follow them home from car meets and shows, then smash the window, plug in a chip to the ODB port that overrides the key detection then use the keyless ignition button and drive off. Takes less than 30secs!
Many drivers are now putting in hidden kill switches and the old steering wheel locks.
If I get a new fancy bike, I am going to get it chained to a security bolt on the floor, maybe a D-lock too
It's actually worse than that - the forums exploded last weekend as one guy found a homemade tracker on his MK1 RS after coming back from a show, posted a warning which then went viral as loads of other RS and similar type owners found them on their cars too.
Bastards.
Had two bikes taken from garage in Preston at Christmas ignored lower price bikes . I suspect they followed my car as had roof bike carrier I think thet are bad idea as fairly permanent though that is why I preferred them. I really didn't think police give much attention. Soco tech attended but didn't even see police officer as statement taken over phone.
I sympathise; it's horrible having a bike stolen. But why leave them in the garage? Garages are so easy to get into.
Expensive bike = inside the house.
Also removed my bike from Strava a while ago. Would be nice if everyone could play nice and share info openly but alas no. Twunts are everywhere so.
How do you move such a massive volume of bikes though. The cycling community is pretty sharp when it comes to spotting bikes, so you can't move it on eBay or Gumtree without taking a stupid risk. Good luck flogging a 10 grand Pinarello for example.
Maybe there's a network where they move them to the continent?
You don't flog a £10,000 Pinarello, you sell bits and pieces of the bike via several different aliases on ebay, gumtree, bike forums, hang onto the frame for a year or two, then sell that on under the claim that you've used it for a few years and now you're upgrading or that you bought it secondhand but never got round to building it up or any one of a number of excuses that sound perfectly plausible.
There was a story (that I can't find now) about a guy in USA who's house got searched by police for something completely unrelated and they found hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bikes & equipment where he was doing exactly that. He'd buy the stuff direct from thieves for $50 (which they'd spend on drugs), he'd store it, strip bikes down, rebuild them in different incarnations, sell them piecemeal. No one suspected a thing, he was a nice family man, good rider, rode with the local club, helped out at races - all the while looking aorund for the next bike to steal and he'd get his local minions to do that so nothing was ever traced to him.
Bloody hell.
There's a seller I messaged on eBay yesterday about a Cervelo S5 2013 model, he seems to have loads of posh used bikes in ace condition going cheap. Fits that description! They aren't replicas either (I can spot the fake S5's on eBay, there's one there at the moment at least).
Or equally, that could be someone who went to a police auction and bought a job lot of recovered bikes. Police auctions can be pretty cool, evenually the police get bored of having loads of items clogging up a warehouse, the original owner has never reclaimed it (either becasue they can't be traced or because the insurance has already paid out) so the police shift it all. Most of it is BSO tat - knackered old Halfords Apollos - but sometimes you find some real gems there.
Some of it is new-old stock (NOS) from shops. Loads of shops buy in ultra-high end kit but the reality is that most people buy bikes at the <£1000 mark so eventually after it's sat in a warehouse for 3 years the shop sell it off via ebay. It doesn't look good on a shop website if they're selling 3yr old bikes so they leave the shop website to display all the current stock and sell off NOS via other channels.
That's the problem - finding the legit stuff in amongst the stolen stuff.
On Ebay, if a bike is being sold with "hydrolic dik breaks" or "20-speed Shamono geers" that's usually an indication that the seller probably isn't to be trusted...
My favorite example of this was an EBay ad for a Colnago in which the seller asserted that a sign of the bike's elite status was, it had been signed by its builder, Evug Fololuayo.
This is a good point. We like to think that thieves are distinct from "cyclists" and that's probably true of the guys with bolt croppers hanging round the bike racks in town and flogging stuff to cash converters etc, but at the top it's all cyclists.
There is a privacy feature on Strava to prevent people finding your exact location.
If you live in a town or city it should be enough to prevent a thief discovering exactly which house or garage your bike is in.
I also don't bother putting the make/model of my bike on Strava, just seems like an advert for thieves!
Just list them as "Apollo" and "carrera"
LOL!
Looked those up.
Thinkin about listing my bike as: Carrera Crossfire 3 Hybrid 2015
I recently renamed all mine to things like "the summer bike", "the single speed bike", "the one with track ends" etc. It means something to me, but I'm not advertising that I've got some super fancy kit. Not that my kit is very fancy, but even so...
Harsh (but fair). What about:
"The bike I keep in the shed. Next to the Rotweiler"