Your Bike Just Got Stolen. These Vigilantes Will Get It Back

A decade and a half ago a film-producer buddy and I, along with a motley crew of some other rad folks did a web-series based on putting out a series of "Bait-bikes" and trying to film people stealing them and then us eventually recovering them, with the intention of showcasing how serious a problem bike theft had become in our city. Despite everyone of the half dozen people involved in the project having had the bad luck of having at least one bike stolen each in the past year, for some reason despite a week's worth of sitting out in the cold watching and filming our "Bait-bike" sitting barely locked up in a series of sketch alleys, it didn't get stolen a single damn time! Ironically my producer buddy who started the whole project had his personal bike stolen the week after we wrapped...

Definitely is a valuable service, but probably hard to scale in the same way that the crime does.

Professional thieves either chop the bikes up or collect them and export.

It would be nice to have some kind of international theft settlements/sanctions for those countries that receive stolen goods or allow internet scams. That would at least align incentives somewhat for those in power, but it is still very difficult to sanction enough that it outweighs the bribes from the criminal revenue stream.

It's a difficult situation.

https://bikeindex.org/news/closing-the-loop-a-deep-dive-on-a...