An avid cyclist used his community bike theft prevention tool, Facebook, a VPN, and a bottomless reservoir of determination to dismantle one of the most prolific bicycle thievery schemes in American history.
California, USA, 2020: riots and looting, a looming presidential election, a pandemic still raging on into the new Delta variant, and Mr. Brian Hance is urgently attempting to get the police to investigate what he says is an organized international bicycle smuggling ring depriving hundreds of Americans of their high-end bikes.
As one might imagine, the police in counties like Sonoma, Santa Clara, and Santa Cruz didn’t listen to him. “We’re not Interpol” they would say.
Mr. Hance took up the charge himself, putting together dossiers of evidence on a one-man mission to prevent bike theft in America. Submitting them to various district attorneys, he watched as several key cogs in a giant machine of sophisticated bike theft and smuggling were dismantled.
The story, four years in the making, and summarized by Jessica Garrison of the LA Times, started in early 2020. Bike sales in the terrified and locked-down state of California are skyrocketing as residents seek alternatives to public transport.
Bryan Hance runs Bike Index, a website where bike owners can register their bikes with serial numbers and photos to help ensure that if they’re ever stolen, there’s a community of people who may be able to help find it.
There are 1.3 million bikes on the site, and for a long time the reported thefts were simply crimes of opportunity, but in the spring of 2020, scores of high-end bikes began appearing as missing on Bike Index, and Hance began seeing pictures on Facebook and Instagram of bikes for sale that matched the descriptions of those listed as stolen from Bike Index.
They were all up for sale: in Guadalajara, Mexico. All up and down California, bikes would be reported missing, and then extremely similar, if not identical bikes, would appear on Facebook and Instagram in Mexico in just a few days.
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Hance urged theft victims to report the crime in as detailed a way as possible to build a case file, and then ask the police to contact him so he could explain what he had stumbled upon. He spoke with a dozen police departments and none of them took any action.
Finally, a major development occurred when the Attorney General’s office of Colorado indicted eight people on 227 counts of theft, including 29 bike shop burglaries. All eight pled guilty; one had driven his truck 158 times to Ciudad Juarez in Mexico during the year in which the robberies were committed. That same person had a habit of making large cash withdrawals in Denver and large cash deposits in a bank in El Paso.
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Hance had been clued into the Colorado bike smuggling ring with a Modus Operandi extremely similar to that of the one he believed was behind the thefts all over California, but was even more bold—bike thieves at one point smashed through the front of a bike shop with a van, loaded up the van with a dozen bikes, and drove off.
As to the California smugglers, Hance believes the man at the end of the trail is operating out of Jalisco, and Hance’s sleuthing turned up perhaps the chief fence on this side of the border. Victoriano Romero—who was then subsequently raided by police and found to be in possession of bikes similar to ones reported stolen on Bike Index, along with $200,000 cash in a strongbox in his San Jose auto shop.
The arrest of Romero hasn’t disrupted the network, and Hance still sees that the Jalisco seller routinely offers high-end bikes for sale on his social media pages: accessible only because Hance uses a VPN to funnel his connection through Mexico.
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At the moment, the case is hot but has reached an impasse, with Hance still receiving correspondences with people explaining how their bikes have been stolen in ways that match what he’s already identified as being connected to the Mexican smugglers. He’s only one man, but he’s made a heck of a difference; and he’s not finished yet—incensed as he is every time he sees the Jalisco or Guadalajara sellers put a new bike up for sale.
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