What to do if your bike is stolen

Ride a raleigh lizard with bent forks, you'll always be safe.

Excellent advice.

LFGSS Providing Londoners with Excellent Advice Since 2007

Another way to look for your stolen bike online is to set up a Google Alert with the key phrases your bike might be sold under.

So, if you've lost a green fixed-gear Raleigh with chrome handlebars, you might set up Google Alerts for:

Green + Raleigh + fixed gear

Green + fixed gear + chrome

Raleigh + fixed gear + chrome handlebars

It's worth creating two or three Alerts, including one quite generic, because the thief might not know the correct terms, or he might deliberately write vague descriptions.

Google Alerts will ping all the links to your email, you just need to sort through them.

If your bike is individual enough, you've set the right Alert up, and the thief tries to sell it online (even after months), Google will find it.

It's not fool-proof, but it'll save more time than trawling through all the sites one by one. It also helps if you're outside London and don't have Bikeshd.co.uk to look through (which is a brilliant site).

Hope this helps - if it's old advice then please ignore it. I only found this site (and the "Locks that work" thread) after I had my bike stolen. It was a generic Black Subway Carrera from Halfords, so although I found lots of matches, it's been impossible to work out if any were my bike.

Still, I like my new cheap second-hand bike more.

Oliver,
The insurance link the in OP is broken.
Just interested as I have recently thought about getting some insurance and wondering cost/where to go

Thanks, Chris. I suspect the Mergatron was at work there! Fixed now.

ive recovered bikes before by telling the local bike shop about the theft, usually turns up there to be sold at some point and then get the little pricks

If you've lost a bike.... brick lane is always worth a look... quite a few turn up there...

I reclaimed my old cannondale back from there one weekend!!

Yeah, my sister had a friend who brought a stolen bike on brick lane, he returned it to the owner though. Lucky

i would check up on gumtree, there's always all sorts of stolen shit on there

I was pleased to 'reclaim' my bike from brick lane market a couple of years ago. However, we just had the police in at work today doing bike security marking and they told a colleague that stolen bikes are starting to be sold at London Fields market (saturdays) in response to a crack-down at Brick Lane.

That is outside the actual market boundary of Broadway Market, which is a very well-run market. There is certainly no room for stolen bikes there. We have heard of some trade in stolen bikes moving on to Kingsland Waste and Nine Elms markets. There are probably others it's getting displaced to. Hopefully, enforcement will become consistent throughout London to stop this displacement from happening.

thanks for the great advice

My Freind Had A Tracking Thing Inside His Frame And Another Like Device Saying Whereabouts His Bike Is, So That Could Help Depending On How Fast You React To The Theft.

Global Positioning System

It's all the rage these days

I am not completly sure but I will ask him and get back to you, I think he purchased it at billys bike shop maybe?

You can place it in your frame, crank or forks.

What Is The Transmission Mechanism Though? How Does The GPS On The Bike Tell Me Where It Is?

Original Mini Realtime GSM GPRS GPS Tracker Tracking Device TK102

@£54 on ebay.

Find a place you can conceal it on your bike. It will require a 70mm by 50mm cavity and least 20mm in depth.

Then...

GSM - GPS via satellites - send the LONG and LAT to your mobile, then you plot the co-ordinates into google earth and find your bike, mate, whatever etc.

P.S you will need to charge it everyday. So if you lose anything act on it quick.

My bike was stolen the other day. I've had it for many years, so it's a big loss. A very helpful guy in a bike shop told me about this site. As soon as I get beyond the nursery stage, I'd like to post a photo of my bike so that if anyone has seen it they could let me know? I didn't think it was valuable to anyone but me.

Post it in the Stolen Bikes thread, freedombiker. I understand how you feel--I have an old beater which is twenty years old and about which no-one cares but me ... :)

I care about it

Thanks. That helps. And I will post it in the stolen bikes thread.

Ring around the local 2nd hand shops/2nd hand bike shops if it does go missing. If they're looking for it, they can't buy it because they'll stung for buying stolen goods. But we've got a direct number for local police so they can go looking for the gypos.

Post it in the Stolen Bikes thread, freedombiker. I understand how you feel--I have an old beater which is twenty years old and** about which** no-one cares but me ... :)

bravo

That is outside the actual market boundary of Broadway Market, which is a very well-run market. There is certainly no room for stolen bikes there. We have heard of some trade in stolen bikes moving on to Kingsland Waste and Nine Elms markets. There are probably others it's getting displaced to. Hopefully, enforcement will become consistent throughout London to stop this displacement from happening.

Strange though it might seem, market trade in stolen bikes is far from the worst asset to the stolen bikes trade. Bikes are always going to be stolen so I feel a lot more comfortable knowing that if I have my bike stolen I know a few places I could look and possibly get it back, slim though the chances of finding it might be.

Ofc enforcement is good, but I'd rather not see stolen bikes driven totally underground or out of the city, that'd definitely be worse.

It's a knotty problem, but of course if enforcement was consistent across cities, it would be a lot less attractive to target bikes. I don't really think that they lend themselves very well to an underground market owing to their size and complexity. I think that's more for drugs or art treasures.

Dunno, I can see chaps walking around pulling bikes from underneath trench coats. ;)

On a more serious note, I do think there'd still be a trade in stolen bikes, in order to have a really big crackdown on the trade the police would have to deploy a lot of resources consistently, which probably exceeds the benefits of doing so, especially when compared to other crimes and the actual resources they have available to them. Perhaps it's time to form a cycle militia.