Merseyside man gets stolen bike back... after spotting it for sale in Cash Converters shop window

I have a similar story concerning Brick Lane:

About a month ago, my girlfriend and I biked to a bakery near London fields station where we locked our bikes on a lamppost. When we came out of the shop not even ten minutes later, our bikes were gone, and the remains of the locks showed that a bolt cutter had been used to steal the bikes.

We immediately called the Police who were kind and helpful. After that, and on our own initiative, we immediately walked to Sclater Street near Brick Lane Market where, as we know, many stolen bikes are sold on Sundays. When we arrived, we indeed found one of the bikes very soon; the other one had been sold already. We called the Police who were kind and helpful but could do nothing at all about the fence who had sold / was trying to sell the bike(s).

What can we learn from this?

Had we not called the police immediately after the theft, and had we instead taken a taxi to Sclater Street / Brick Lane, we would probably have arrived before the thieves - which means we could most probably have found both bikes instead of only one.

It's quite a scandal that the council allows the sale of used bikes on their markets. Yes, the guy in question had an official stall.

Falco

A friend and colleague had his newish £800 bike stolen from outside our office in Leeds city centre. 2 days later I was walking to work and about half a mile from the office I spotted my friend's bike leaning against a wall. I did a hasty double take and then went to retrieve it, just as the new owner re-appeared.

Luckily he was a visiting polish cyclist that had spotted a bargain the previous day in a Cash Converters, about 5 miles away. Bizarrely, he'd bought it for £30 and ridden it almost back to the scene of the crime.

My mate got his bike back, I got a bottle of wine as a reward, the polish guy got his £30 back and best of all, the numpty thief used his passport as ID to sell it to Cash Converters so he ended up in court.

I lost a Sun GT 10XL when I was about 15 after I left it locked up outside the local train station, a very small rural station that was manned by a rather odd and taciturn fellow with ginger sideburns. A week later I spotted the very same bloke on my bike. Thing is, he was cycling past the station that I went to twice every weekday, as he probably could have worked out for himself if he'd managed to scrape together enough braincells to mull it over. Anyway, I got it back. He told the police he'd bought it from a bloke whom he described as average height and build, brown hair, no distinguishing features. Funny that.

I was moving house and stashed my cheapo singlespeed mountain bike in my friend's garden shed, intending to collect it once all my other stuff was moved.

At some point a couple of scallies seem to have clocked her unloading her (much nicer) mountain bike from her car, and concluded that it must be stashed in the flimsily secured wooden structure in the garden. So they came back later that night, broke the hasp, and nicked my MTB together with her hack bike.

Despite only purchasing it for the princely sum of £100, I was pretty annoyed to be parted from my faithful clunker, and I started doing a bit of detective work, including saving the brand and model as a favourite search on eBay.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and I get an email saying a search result has been returned. I look at the picture and it's my bike. Read the description and it's written in stereotypical thief-speak - "Supa lite biek, hydrolick brakes" etc. He also wants payment via cash on collection. In an impulsive moment, I whack a large bid on it. Then contact the police and give them my crime number, and tell them I've spotted a bike which I'm certain is mine.

A couple more days pass with no response from the police, and I get an email telling me I've won the bike, together with the seller's postcode. I contact the police again to pass on the info, but then I have to go to Scotland for a mate's stag do. The seller contacts me and seems really eager to get payment so I stall him. Over the next few days I get more messages from him saying things like "when u gunna colect m8?" and "da deal is turnin sour".

Finally my case gets passed on to some police officers who appear to have an interest in sorting it. They tell me that there's a "known address" within the postcode I've been given, and they're planning to go and search it. A few hours later I get a call and they've recovered my bike, along with a couple of others.

They ask what evidence I can produce to prove that it's mine, and I immediately feel like a massive numpty for not taking down the serial number. So I describe it as best I can, including various stickers, the one black spoke in the back wheel (I didn't have any spare silver ones) and the top cap with my name on it that I got for entering a mountain bike race. Incredibly the thief hasn't changed this, so after giving a short statement, I'm wheeling my bike out of the station.

My friend got her hack bike back separately after it was found abandoned. I never found out what happened to the thief.

Had a bike nicked from round the back of my house when i was teenager. It was an early mountain bike and quite distinctive.
The moron who nicked it, i was to discover,lived not far away and cycled past my house - i followed him home. He left it unlocked round the back of house.
I just 'nicked' it back!
Ironically it got stolen again. It was locked up in town but the fuckers still got it. I saw some smackhead riding it about 6 months later but it had been run into the ground and wasnt worth taking back.

During my misspent youth (2008) I had my bmx stolen from the lamppost I had locked it to whilst at a party. Whilst out running two days later I saw a kid riding my bike (with its custom paint job) around town. Safe to say that the police recognised him and arrested him for theft, but to my disappointment my bike was seized as 'evidence' for the best part of 3 months.

I lost a hack bike that i'd built in a 'build a bike for £100' challenge. I'd left it at the station and I hadn't locked it up; i never did because it looked like a piece of junk

I got back and it was gone. Assuming it had been nicked I walked home. Six months later I was at the station again and saw it resting in the corner of the stationmaster's office. he'd thought that someone had forgotten to lock their bike and had removed it for safekeeping

It is worth reflecting on the economics of bicycle theft. There will always be a market for stolen bikes and bike parts, but in London especially this has been over-inflated by the sheer numbers of people who will happily buy gear that, if they gave it any thought at all, they would know to be almost certainly nicked.

What I've never quite understood is how the bike vendors at Brick Lane (and other markets) are allowed to stay in trade, so blatantly hooky is their stockholding.

The harder you make it for theives to sell on bicycles, the less likely it is that they will be stolen in the first place (particularly to the kleptomaniacal degree that they are in London). It's no silver bullet but, y'know, marginal gains and all that.

I was reunited with my beloved Saracen nzyme mountain bike after it had been stolen when I was a teenager. A friend of mine spotted it in the river embeded in the reeds a few miles from where we lived.
Turns out a lad who had been recently fostered by a family up the road who my mum had forced me into befriending because she was friends with the family had nicked it.
I clearly didn't try hard enough at being friendly.
He left the following week.

In this case the guy was a dimwit. If he'd simply handed the bike over when asked rather than waiting for the police, he'd have avoided a criminal record:

just as we were deciding where exactly to head, a chap walked into us, wheeling my wife's bike. We asked him to stop and explained it had been stolen less than an hour earlier.

He wasn't happy. He tried telling us that since he'd bought it in good faith, it was his. He asked us to prove it was my wife's - she pointed to the stickers with her initials on the top tube.

He told us he'd only bought it because his daughter's bike had been stolen, and he wanted to get her a replacement. He protested that he should at least get back the money he'd paid for it.

"Fine," I said, dialling on my phone. "Let's get the police to sort it out." The operator said someone would be with us within minutes.

A small crowd had formed. Some of them seemed to know the guy with the bike. Several were urging him to forget the bike and go. He was insistent though that if he couldn't have the bike, he'd at least wait to see if the police could help him get his thirty-five quid back.

As a schoolboy in 1984 I had my pride & joy nicked out the garage full campag nuvo, gp4's the works.Mam & Dad paid the bulk for Christmas £200 the ballance was on the local bike shop "Dentons" book £3 per week. Anyhoo it went the journey, but at school I was informed my bike was seen around a estate not far from my house. So off I went saw some Glue sniffing Tosser on it and attacked him furiously with bottom pole off a swing-ball. Two punctured Wolber juniors and upturned Cinelli bars were my only wounds. Scum 0 little guy 1