Someone attempted to steal my friends bike and wrote of the frame in the process, what can we do?

Hi all,

As the title suggests someone tried to steal my friends bike, it was a brand new pinnacle frame built up with parts bought from here and some spares, today was her first day riding it to uni in london and she used her usual lock up.

The bike was locked up with an abus lock and rear wheel secured with a pitlock and whilst she was doing her uni duties someone had been trying to steal her bike.

They were obviously trying to pry the D-lock open with a bottlejack or something? And the top tube has two massive dents in it and they've made the frame about 8mm out of true.

Has this happened to anyone else? She doesnt have insurance as it was literally the first day out with this bike..

What can we do? a
I have told her to try and see if the uni have any CCTV around the bike lockup but I dont even know where to start with this. The bike cost a lot in total considering she is a student with basically no money.
Its shameful really :/

Any advice would be appreciated.

Cheers

3 Attachments

That's a straight write off unfortunately.

If you were insured, then you would contact the police, get a crime reference number and if they were bothered (which they would not be unfortunately as this is just criminal damage and no-one has been hurt), they would contact the university security team and get the grainy CCTV then do nothing with it because the person was wearing a cap/sunglasses/gloves.

Jumping all the hoops above would get your insurance to start a claim. Then say the bike is not worth anything and the excess is £200.

Most of the parts are salvageable. Get another cheap frame on here or on eBay (should get one for less than £100) and spend 3h rebuilding it.

Sorry if that's not what you want to hear but that's what it is...

Looks like they tried to use the frame as a lever to twist the lock open. That frame is a write off, all I can think of is getting a new frame and transplanting the components over.
It's not helpful now but with a decent looking bike like that always try and put two locks on it, if only to make it look more intimidating to thieves so they don't attempt to steal it, but it also means they can't pick the frame up to try and twist the lock.