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Comment by throwaway82931 | Hacker News Reader

> Ideally, this article would hopefully help de-platform this seller off of Facebook, but we aren't holding our breath on that one. Facebook is basically terrible about this, and their existing mechanisms for dealing with reporting sellers like this simply don't work.

> [...]

> There is no button to click where you can explain to anybody at FB "this is a repeat seller of bikes stolen in Colorado, and here's our proof, and here's our contact info." etc. It is almost as if their system for reporting stolen goods is designed not to work.

So "storefront for stolen goods" is another way Facebook makes our lives worse.

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In Vancouver if your bike gets stolen there's also an almost literal storefront for stolen goods. If your bike gets stolen and is worth a few thousand dollars there's a good chance it will turn up within a few hours to a few days at a street market of stolen goods, in a specific several block zone of East Hastings.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=east+hast...

If it is really high end (like $7000+ Canadian dollar value) and the theft was targeted rather than random, more likely it might get parted out/sold as components on facebook or sent to another provice for sale by an organized group. Very occasionally Vancouver police or RCMP will find a storage unit full of $7000+ bikes that are being collected together in one place prior to transport out of province.

The thing I find surprising about high-end bike crime -- it seems easy to crack down on -- if there's any desire to do so.

Acquire some bait bikes, then put some 40mm GPS trackers somewhere unusual in the bike (the chain stays?), maybe this requires a bit of surgery, but this seems like a relatively small cost. Then raid whatever warehouse they end up in.

I guess there's no real political will to do this.

chainstays seem like it would be a hard technical problem since cutting open/accessing the inside of a chain stay would greatly weaken a bike. and on road bikes/hybrid bikes the chainstay diameter can be quite narrow.

Some sort of GPS+LTE data modem and battery might be easily integrated into a seatpost based tracker, or stem, or combined stem-bar unit. A bit tricky since either aluminum or carbon fiber structural components are RF opaque.

maybe mounted in one of the areas in the downtube or seat tube that's designed into modern road bikes for ultegra/di2 internal battery mounting, or related to power meter crankset mounting.

I think the downside of seatpost/stem is that it's more easy to check. Good point about RF, didn't consider that. I still think it's within the realms of possibility though?

Maybe built into/epoxied to the inside-facing-side of crankset arms? Such that it looks like an expensive power meter crank. Definitely within the realm of possibility and I have heard that people have successfully done it as a DIY approach.

Maybe they don't need to be hidden that well. If one or slip past then you can track those to the warehouse and send a few people to jail.

After that people can add fake trackers (maybe an antenna lead under the seat). Now the thieves have extra uncertainty, raising the cost to steal. And working trackers will be mixed in with the fake ones, making each bike a gamble.

This strategy works well in biology. Have one brightly coloured poisonous frog and then there are three or four mimics who are not poisonous (poison requires lots of resources!). Sure, some frogs still get eaten, but the mere threat of poison reduces the risk.

> chainstays seem like it would be a hard technical problem since cutting open/accessing the inside of a chain stay would greatly weaken a bike.

On a bait bike it wouldn’t matter too much since you just want to track the thing and shouldn’t really care about the thieves getting a fully working bike.

I had this “bait bike” in the back of my pickup truck that was in very bad shape that helped a kid down the street get their stolen bike back, apparently the thief decided that the bike I had was better than their current stolen one so did a quick swap and another neighbor saw my bike dumped around the corner, a bike lying in the street next to my truck and put two and two together. Worked out pretty well considering I found the one bike on the side of the road while walking my dog and threw it in my truck to see how long it would take to get stolen — didn’t think it would last a week but I drove around with that thing for seven months.

> I guess there's no real political will to do this.

Correct. Police generally don't give two figs about property crime.

In the 2000s Craigslist was threatened by a coalition of 40 state attorneys general into policing their sex ads....Facebook will need something similar.

I would rather the government do their job and police and prosecute illegal acts.

Like prosecuting Facebook for colluding in the sale of stolen property?

I'm genuinely curious. How would you propose Facebook enforce this?

People selling bikes include both first-hand buyers and second-hand buyers (people who bought it from someone else).

Without a central registry like what we have for cars, I don't know what Facebook could do.

Disallow selling bikes. If you can't figure out a way to only allow legal resales, you shouldn't be in the business

And hurt everyone who is legit selling their own bike too.

If the question is: how do we prevent sale of stolen bikes, I’m not sure how that solves the problem.

Is there a possible way for FB and other similar places (offerup, pawn shops, etc.) to verify without some central registry?

bike index has an open API

Traditional retailers of used goods like pawn shops are usually subject to pretty stringent regulation - not necessarily to determine if goods are stolen, but to record identification of the seller to enable an investigation later. In some places this does include proactively sending a report of items to the police for checking against stolen reports. So there's a pretty clear precedent for regulation of this kind directed towards online marketplaces, but you can no doubt predict the questions around the difference between a pawn shop (being the seller) and Facebook (being not the seller but just a provider of listings).

States enforce pawn laws through electronic systems like LEADS. FB, offerup, and every other platform out there letting thieves fence things with impunity could implement same.

How does LEADS work and how could FB and OfferUp use it?

Facebook has all the information any willing police officer/DA would need to capture the thieves. All they would need to do is go to a judge and ask.

Also the legislature could make laws to make it easier to send bike thieves to jail.

The government != Facebook and it's better that way since we can vote to change things that we find wrong with the government, but lack that ability with FB

Attorneys general DGAF about cyclists. If they did, there would be more prosecutions for vehicular assault/murder.

Wonder if there has been a biking political group that got a 'bicycle DA' elected in and what happened.

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