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Hello,
Im new to this forum so please bear with me. Im not from london (from Yorkshire) but have recently had some bikes stolen from my boyfriends garage and hope that I can pass on some help/info we have recieved from the police. Im not sure if its already been said or will help but its devastating loosing a bike to some little toerags!We had all mountain bikes stolen (Giant Reign x2 fully custom build, Giant Faith half build and a halford special kids bike) last saturday. We cough one of the guys who had stolen the bike just 20 yards from the house picking up the Faith from a bush with his grandad. The faith was in the back of their van so I blocked the van in with my car, my boyfriend grabbed the bike out of the van and we got the police. After being ran over by them and them assulting my mother in law they got away - thankfully while on the phone we had already given the police the reg number and description so within 10 minutes they had been stopped and arrested. This was at 11am the following morning so the guy wasnt the brightest tool in the box.
Initially we were told by the police that it was unlikely that we would get the bikes back, and to check obvious places like cash converters/cash generator type places - while doing this we found a handful of bikes which you just wouldnt hand into those kind of places no matter how desperate you were for the money.
A week had passed and our beloved Giant Reign was still missing, I'd emailed all the cash converter type places, contacted local bike shops and was scouring the net for the bike or its parts to no avail. We're members of a few forums so we posted the details on their as well (like pinkbike etc) so we had many people on the look out.
Then we recieved an email from the police lady handeling the case to say that she had downloaded the data from the guys phone (who was well known for bike theft) and he had used ebay & preloved alot and had countless pictures of bikes but none that matched our reign but they were looking into the other bikes to see if they could return these to their owners.
We had spoken to people who had said that alot of missing things turn up on the singletrack forum (we looked into this and there is ALOT of obviously stolen things on there from bikes to Ipads and tvs - theres a rather nice roady bike on with carbon forks which my boyfriend says is worth a fortune and is for sale for £300 ish so thats obviously missing its owner) so might be worth checking on for stolen stuff.
Thankfull, we have been reunited with our Reign after another theify scamp was seen by some friends riding it though a local town, followed him and chased him into his house. The police came and recovered the bike but the fella had gotten away. Luckily/ foolishly the lad handed himself into the police after reporting a burgalry at his house and someone had stolen his bike and some other bits from his house.
So were just missing our halfords special kids bike, but thankfully we have the 2 more important expensive bikes back and santa will probably show up with a new one for the little lady and some big locks to go with the alarm and bars on the windows and CCTV!
Ended up having a bit of a rambel, sorry. Its amazing what the public and having people looking for your pride and joy can do - we wouldnt have got ours back if it wasnt for our friends and friends of friends etc. But please, do check ebay, preloved and singletrack incase your stuff is on there, you never know :)
toodles!
Sorry, I should have said - the bikes were stolen and found in Yorkshire. We are from the Leeds area but thought if I could help anyone get their bike back then its worth ours going missing for a little while.
The police here have been fantastic, but I cant help but think if we hadnt have cought the first one and then had the second one spotted we wouldnt have stood a chance!
Its quite sad that this sort of crime doesnt seem to be taken too seriously and that its growing so much. Weve been hit twice this year, before it was in May just before we were going to the Megavalance and our mates bike and a few others went which we sadly never found.
If I find anything else out from the police about where bikes are turning up then I'll let you guys know :)