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Comment by bckygldstn | Hacker News Reader

There's a Dutch bike company (VanMoof) that offers a Theft Recovery service for their bikes: they have teams of people that track down the bike (using GPS primarily) and basically steal it back.

They used to produce monthly videos of bike recovery operations, though it looks like they've stopped the videos so you'll have to scroll past a few years of promo videos: https://www.youtube.com/@vanmoof

Often they recover the bike from a yard / homeless camp / shop with 100s of other non-VanMoof bikes they leave behind. It would be so easy to crack down on organised bike theft. The financial, social, and environmental costs of securing bikes and recovering from a theft is huge.

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VanMoof is also responsible for the clever hack of disguising bicycle packaging as television packaging for shipment, as US carriers are much more careful with TV boxes than bicycle boxes:

https://www.vanmoof.com/blog/en/tv-bike-box

I did not hear about VanMoof earlier but my buddy called police (Amsterdam area of course) once when he found his bike and he wanted to be good citizen so he did not want to just steal it back from some backyard.

Well police helped him recover the bike without arresting anyone and told him next time he should just steal it back and don't bother them.

Don’t disturb cops while they drink coffee. Poor guys. /s

How is taking your own property back being a bad citizen?

I think he intended to be a good citizen by leading the police to some bike thieves.

In some countries it might be illegal to disturb someone's possession of something, as a general rule, regardless of legitimate ownership.

For example, in Sweden, if it's been more than 24 hours, it's illegal to do it on your own.

Wow this is crazy to me.

I guess that's parts and parcel for a country that just stopped reporting crime stats for certain crimes a while ago.

It becomes complicated if the new owner has legitimately bought the bike in a second hand store.

It's not that complicated, legally speaking. The rightful owner gets to get their stuff back, and the new "owner" has a claim against the purveyor of stolen goods for the purchase price.

At least in Austria that's not how it works.

The new "owner" will keep the bike as he has bought it in good faith. The shop will claim that it cannot check every used bike. The rightful owner could try to get money from the person who stole it (if found), but they most likely don't have any money.

It's the perfect crime and the reason why we cannot have nice bikes. People are literally sleeping with their expensive bikes in a room.

I can't believe the law works like that. Are you telling me that if I buy a yacht in Austria "in good faith" from someone who doesn't own it, I can just sail away on the yacht, original owner be damned?

Not a lot of yachts in Austria

There's same law in Switzerland.

However as soon as you as the buyer feel something is off, you aren't protected anymore because only good faith buyers are protected. For example if you go to the black market or something seems to be extremely cheap you definitively aren't protected anymore.

It's a conflict of interests. This law is trying to do a tradeoff. Imagine you went to Walmart and bought a bike and everything seemed fine but it turned out that an employee stole the bike and sold it to you in the name of Walmart. In this case you can keep the bike.

In the Netherlands second hand bicycle stores have to keep records where their bikes come from. A stolen bike shouldn’t end up in a legitimate shop.

Surely we can trust hundreds and hundreds of small business owners to be very strict about law enforcement when it pushes against their financial interests, in a country with more bikes then people.

No stolen bikes end up in shops, no siree. Yeah right.

We’re living in an era where people regularly use tracking devices to retrieve their stolen bicycles. If they turn up in a store the owner should run into trouble even without regular checks.

Of course this depends on the police not being lazy which clearly is a big ask but if that is too much any law is pointless.

It seems it depends on the jurisdiction. In the US you can’t launder title for stolen goods like this. If you bought a stolen bike, well it sucks to be you. The bike goes back to the rightful owner.

If you go to someones backyard and start taking things and they call the police then you are a bad citizen.

Calling cops and doing it with their help covers your ass.

It's called trespassing.

Citizens are, generally, not supposed (nor expected to) to take justice into their own hands.

Unfortunately that is one of the best outcomes you can expect. At least he got his bicycle back.

During COVID there were plenty of officers available to fine normal people who were sitting too close on a bench. But to deal with real criminals who talk back is too much of a hassle.

> Often they recover the bike from a yard / homeless camp / shop with 100s of other non-VanMoof bikes they leave behind. It would be so easy to crack down on organised bike theft. The financial, social, and environmental costs of securing bikes and recovering from a theft is huge.

The problem is that Dutch police are a narco-state dysfunctional hellhole. They don't do anything that goes after organized crime... they even cut the team dealing with the gangs behind ATM explosions in Germany [1].

[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/geldautomaten-sprengung...

> basically steal it back

This brings up an interesting legal question.

Is it illegal to steal back your own property? Even if you trespass onto private property to do so, the person would have to get the Police involved to do anything about that, at which time you can say "Sure, I'll take the trespassing charge, and while we're here I'm leaving with all of my property".

Not a lawyer, but talked about this with one once and this is what I remember. By definition you can't steal something that belongs to you. The fact that someone else stole it doesn't make it stop being yours. However it might still be illegal to take it back if doing so involves breaking other laws, like breaking and entering, assault, or what have you. It might not be crazy to risk a trespass, since those generally aren't enforced even when they should be. On the other hand in the USA entering someone's home uninvited can give them legal grounds to use deadly force on a presumption of self-defense, even if your bike is in their back yard. So not only would that be illegal, it could be very dangerous. I'd bet dollars to donuts that anyone inclined to give advice on the subject would say eat the loss and move on.

Strangely there are jurisdictions where if your stuff is in a pawn shop and the pawnbroker claims he didn't know it was stolen, he might have the legal right to recoup what he paid for it from you!

So given the privacy horror that is cell phone location data selling if you know someone's home address and name you could probably arrange to pick up the bike where they normally tie it up.

>bet dollars to donuts

Donuts are now over $14/dozen each where I live. Another casualty of inflation I guess.

You just call the police, say it is your bike, they verify the serial number (you need to provide some proof, or register the theft prior). Then, if everything is in order, police just cut the lock.

I wonder what country this actually works in?

Our police had a policy of not attending house burglaries with odd street numbers to cut their required response rate in half. I can't imagine them even answering the phone over a bike.

The only reason i would call the police is to get a reference number for an insurance claim.

At least for a short while, and I do not understand why, bicycle theft was somehow linked to terrorism by London's police. See [1] for example.

I had a bicycle stolen, and after filing the report the police phoned me to ask for more details on the lock I'd used.

I later found it on Gumtree, with a description ending something like "Call Peter on 07123456789, meet at Forest Heath Station". Putting the mobile phone number into Gumtree's search brought up about 50 bicycles, "Call John" "Call Dave" etc. I emailed this to the police, and had another phone call thanking me for my incredible investigation skill.

They said they would go to find Peter/John/Dave, but would only contact me again if they found my bike, which they did not.

I'm very suspicious of accounts like [2] "Mr T" with "Cash only" and a huge selection of bicycles.

[1] https://www.bikeregister.com/news/putting-a-value-on-protect...

[2] https://www.gumtree.com/profile/accounts/48e9b2ff00d3f04e27f... or similarly https://www.gumtree.com/profile/accounts/b8b756750f2960d115b...

That first Gumtree link is absolutely insane. It looks like a full time job for multiple people.

> At least for a short while, and I do not understand why, bicycle theft was somehow linked to terrorism by London's police.

Counter-Terrorism Patrol Unit.

IME speculation: for security-adjacent personnel, recovery efforts (equipment, fraud, etc.) are a great way to quantify the work you do when you don't otherwise generate revenue. You can't take credit for disrupting events that didn't happen [because you intervened], but nobody can argue with you recovering or clawing back $x in lost/stolen assets.

They were probably tasked with patrolling for misplaced explosives and other drama, but since incident count is low, they were given supplementary tasks (like tagging bikes they come across on patrol) to justify their salary and foster positive PR.

Japan. All bikes must be registered with the local government. Bikes are one of the things police are vigilant about bikes. Police routinely pull over cyclists, especially if you’re a foreigner, to confirm you are the owner of the bike.

Driving a bicycle while intoxicated is also treated just like driving a car.

Electric bikes going 25km an hour or faster, or have larger than a 250watt battery needs to be registered as a motor vehicle. You’ll need a driver’s license, insurance, etc.

IANAL but I don't think you can "steal" your own property.

You might need to do something else though - e.g. trespass or cut someone else's lock etc. You are on my shaky ground then I think.

I guess it depends on local law, but I guess that trespassing is trespassing, and the thief can sue, and it probably already happened.

It is a little different but on one occasion, in France, some guy sold a computer online, sent it, and never got paid. Pissed off, he broke in the crook house and took back his computer (plus a few other things, not smart...), they both sued each other, the crook ended up in prison for 2 months, and the one who broke into his house had 4 months suspended sentence. But even if he just took back his computer, he would still be guilty, but the judge would most likely have handed out a lighter sentence.

With the stolen bike, if the vanmoofs are stealthy enough to no get caught in the act, it might go pretty fine as I assume the thieves won't file police reports. Now if they already sold it, things might get hairy... in my place when your car gets stolen and you file a report you need to provide all kind of documents which a stolen bike owner won't possibly have. So I guess approaching the same way for theft of expensive gear (need to provide ownership proof) could curb it a little. And yes, I know also cars get stolen.

I might as well start a club doing that (or a company if I had the skills). Bike theft is such a sad load on bikers mind.. (even it can be cool to carry a 3kg chain to secure it.. not always)

Watch out - you know heavy chain is also worth money on junkyard so they are going to steal that as well.

True but it requires heavy tooling and more time. Most robbers want cheap shots.

this is patently not true. maybe titanium is gummy enough to give one trouble? but any steel that isn't brittle enough to shatter when you look at it is going to be trivial to cut with an abrasive disk and a battery powered grinder. if the chain is 1/2" instead of 1/4", it will take an extra minute maybe.

yup. even boron steel cuts pretty quickly

And, frankly, who’s going to stop a guy with an angle grinder from stealing a bike that isn’t theirs?

Clearly he is determined to his objetive...

I won't physically stop the person, but I will say something to them and take a photo of them in the act. I don't have a way of knowing if you're doing this legitimately (I've had to cut a lock due to a lost key), so I'm not going to threaten them or call the cops.

I don't think taking a photo will have any actionable follow-up—I have no way of following up to see if someone reports to see anyone has reported a stolen bike in the area—but might make a thief decide to go find a different target, while not being a major issue if you're the actual owner.

As a healthy, medium-large guy who's okay at de-escalation, I live in the assumption that no one will try to hurt me for interfering. I'll probably learn better one day.

I understand the power of angle grinders (so much that I'm still hesitant to buy one), but I object to a battery-powered angle grinder _not_ being "more tools". It has to be at least one level above what the Average Bike Thief carries around, hasn't it? They are certainly not stealthy.

Of course, it's quite possible that the Average Bike Thief in Amsterdam is a well-organized criminal-for-hire kind of person, doing surgical strikes against the most valuable bikes and so on (as is often the case with car theft, afaik). Then perhaps an angle grinder is just standard Day 1 equipment.

There are now d-locks that are angle grinder resistant. The reviews I've read suggest they need two cuts to open and each cut uses a full angle grinder disc.

As ever, impossible to stop a determined thief, but starting to get "good enough".

Do you have some example links on those locks? Might be interesting to check...

This is one option: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMg6zVdYI0g really impressive, I didn't know it's a thing

My VanMoof was recently stolen and although they came through with a replacement, they did not appear to try to track down the bike even though the tracker placed in a fairly precise location in Berlin.

I am sure the bike hunters exist but it wouldn’t surprise me if much of their work is PR.

For everyone else wanting to see the bike hunt videos: https://www.youtube.com/@vanmoof/search?query=bike%20hunt

Link to the playlist Bike Hunters: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWwEynoexJikPNEl0P42A...

The videos are interesting. Will VanMoof go anywhere in Europe for you then to recover these then? I see Strasbourg and Stockholm in addition to the Netherlands. Any insight into how the pricing works for recovery?

From [1] it looks like

* You pay $400 for 3 years of coverage. * Must have the bike locked and file a police report. * They can choose whether or not to attempt recovery. * If they choose not to, or fail to recover the bike, they'll replace it. * Up to 3 replacements are covered in the 3 years.

So it's really just theft insurance but they can attempt to recover low-hanging fruit. In wonder what their attempted recovery rate is.

[1] https://www.vanmoof.com/en-US/peace-of-mind

Not VanMoof, but I worked in the project team doing the theft recovery platform for Gazelle. We managed to recover literally almost every bike, and the recovery rate was 140% because we often found more than just 1 bike reported stolen.

It really worked unexpectedly well, I've heard a lot of skepticism and I don't know how things are at VanMoof but if the will is there it really works

Thanks. The bikes are beautiful which is obviously a double edge sword as it makes them that much more desirable to thieves. It looks like the bikes start at $2500 so $133 a year for insurance isn't terrible. The fact that they offer this just makes me think wow this a forward thinking company, which is also evident in their bikes.

I’m pretty sure they can also remotely disable the electronics.

I presume the researchers would have checked these 100 second-hand bikes for VanMoof trackers before equipping their own trackers?

Ah to clarify: VanMoof make (very expensive) e-bikes with integrated GPS that's used mostly for "smart bike" features. I doubt the researchers could afford a used VanMoof for their study, and the company only tracks their own bikes.

I'd guess part of their motivation is to dissuade theft and resale of their bikes, which are quite distinctive. Though that might be attributing too much rationality to a bike thief.

Vanmoof is a shit company with shit bikes and even more shit customer service. Purely aesthetics and marketing. Stay away.

Your opinion being based on...?

This brand is known for bikes that break very quickly. The bikes are good, but don’t last. They are very expensive and the replacement parts are too.

The VanMoof or Tweakers forums are filled with users talking about the repairs the did this week to their bike, or that they send their bike back since it broke the week they bought it.

Without knowing anything about VanMoof, I'm always (more than I'd ideally like) doing some repairs on whichever bike I'm generally riding. Same for our car, which barely gets driven at all. It seems mechanical stuff needs repairing. Maybe VanMoof riders talk about it more in the forum. Most companies don't offer that...?

It’s definitely possible that there is a bias; users that have perfectly working VanMoofs don’t complain on the forums and just ride their bikes.

Also Vanmoof and the BMW of the bicycle world, most people who ride them, do it in a super annoying way.

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