The Bike Index was started in 2013 and allows people to register bicycles for free and report them when they have been stolen. The nonprofit has helped recover more than 14,000 bikes. As reported in Wired, the group has recently been tracking an elaborate bike theft pipeline that leads back to Mexico. It estimates that from 2020 to 2024, the theft ring will sell an estimated 654 bikes worth more than $1 million. Bryan Hance is a Portlander and co-founder of the group. He joins us to share more about the Bike Index and what it’s uncovered about these thefts.
The following transcription was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: Portlander Bryan Hance helped co-found the Bike Index in 2013. It allows people all around the world to register bicycles for free and report them if they’re stolen. The nonprofit has helped recover more than 14,000 bikes. For years now, as reported recently in Wired magazine, the group has been tracking an elaborate bike theft pipeline that’s based in Mexico. They estimate that just in the last four years, the theft ring has sold more than $1,000,000 worth of stolen bikes.
Bryan Hance joins us now. It’s great to have you on the show.
Bryan Hance: Good morning. Thank you for having me.
Miller: How did you get into this in the first place, registering bikes and then eventually helping people track them down when they’re stolen?
Hance: Not surprisingly, I had a lot of bikes stolen. And I ran a similar site back in the late ‘90s, early 2000s, that only focused on stolen bikes. And then in 2013, I joined forces with a guy out of Chicago who ran a successful Kickstarter. He wanted to do the other thing. He wanted to register them the minute they went out of a bike shop.
We met and really hit it off, and just realized we were both working on two sides of the same coin. Ever since we joined forces, it was truly one of those things where the sum of the parts was greater than the whole. Just from day one, we just started knocking it out of the park and recovering bikes, and it just felt really good.
Miller: You said not surprisingly, it started because you had your own bike stolen. How many of your own bikes have been stolen over the years?
Hance: Too many. I think the last count was seven or nine. I used to live in Arizona. I used to go to college at the University of Arizona and every four months I’d have a bike stolen. It was just a lot. It was a hotbed of crime. It was during the meth era. There wasn’t a lot of enforcement and it got to the point where I’d get one stolen, I’d go buy another one from the local co-op. And another one would get stolen and it was just a never ending cycle.
When you start looking at it from a data perspective, the thing I was trying to solve then was when a bike got stolen on campus and it got recovered in the city, it wasn’t necessarily going to get back into your hands – and vice versa. They both had their own, we call them silos in this industry. They each maintain their own database, their own warehouses. They just don’t talk. So I was trying to just sort of, “Hey, you know, there’s a lot of people out there that are trying to do the good thing,” ranging from bike mechanics, to shop owners, to people buying off Craigslist, to apps and whatnot.
There’s really no open free resource for those people to just do a quick check on their phones. And that’s what I wanted to build. The idea really had legs. You know, there’s no money in it, but it feels really good. There’s a lot of good karma in it. I’ve been doing it for, I think, over 20 years now.
Miller: Anytime something is stolen, it feels like a kind of violation. But I’m curious if there’s something specific about having your bike stolen? I mean, what are some stories that you’ve heard over the years from people, either whose bikes you helped recover or whose bikes were never recovered?
Hance: I mean, people have such a bond with their bikes that they don’t necessarily have with their ipads or their computers or their cars. It’s this thing that takes them places. People don’t call them “machines for freedom” for nothing. They really give people a sense of freedom. They really give people a sense of happiness. They really just really connect with them.
We’ve heard everything. We’ll find a bike that’s maybe worth $200 or $300. And we sort of think, oh, you know, why would you bother recovering this? And then the person tells us, “No, that’s the last thing my dad gave me before he died.” Or, “That’s the bike I rode when I got back from Iraq. And that’s how I dealt with my PTSD.” Or, “That’s the bike I did STP on after I beat cancer.”
It’s just that people have these really deeply emotional connections to their bikes, and they’ve configured them and loved them for so long that the theft is not just, “Oh, I’m out $1,000 to $2,000.” The theft is like, “Wow, you really took a piece of my heart when you stole this thing,” which is why we see people go to incredibly elaborate lengths to recover them.
Miller: So, as I noted in my intro, you’ve helped people recover more than 14,000 stolen bicycles over many, many years. You’ve seen many stolen bicycles offered for sale in various online venues. What stood out to you about a bike that you saw for sale online almost exactly four years ago, in June of 2020?
Hance: Yeah, that one … we see and we’ll see, every single day of every single week, of every month of every year, my inbox is [full of], “Hey, I saw this bike online. I’m pretty sure it’s yours that you listed in the Bike Index.” And we’ll often look at the sellers and we’ll see people with three, five, seven bikes. They’re not huge. That’s sort of like a small operator, in our eyes. The tip that came in about this one was unique because, A) the bike was 2,300 [to] 2,400 miles away in La Barca, Jalisco and B) it was really unique.
So there was no question that we were looking at the same bike. And then C) the more we looked at this seller, and realized how prolific this individual was, and just made another match, and another match, and another match, and another match. They were matches, all from the same geographic area – the Bay Area. That just screams pipeline, that just screams organization. That screams because they were online sales. We could see how much money he was making and that was also quite alarming. So he was just a much larger and much more sophisticated, much more, honestly, suave operator than people that we typically see. And that’s what began this crazy four-year journey.
Miller: Well, what did you do? And it’s worth saying that you estimated that this particular bike, one of literally hundreds, probably cost $8,000. So we’re talking here about super fancy, pretty rare bikes. So what did you do next?
Hance: The short version is [that] I spent the next three years watching this individual incredibly closely, cataloging his sales, making bike matches, capturing the data. [For example], “OK, this bike was posted on this day. Here’s the value. It came from this area.I talked to the victim.” And I tried, for years, to engage with police through those victims.
It was a very uphill battle because I did get a lot of phone calls. I did talk to a lot of detectives. And the minute you said the word “Mexico” they just kind of laughed and said, “Ha ha, this call is over.” You could hear them check out. Eventually, it wound up in the right hands. It wound up with an individual in the burglary squad who realized, “Hey, you’re seeing the tail end of all the stuff that I’m chasing. Can we talk?”
And that began a pretty productive back and forth with that individual because he’s like, “You know, these are all coming from my cases. You found the tail and I’m at the front end. Let’s figure out what we can figure out is happening in the middle.”
Miller: I want to hear about what came from that law enforcement involvement in just a second. But can you just give us a sense for the scale of the operation that you uncovered? So, for example, you said you saw a lot of bikes early on from the Bay Area ending up for sale online, ending up in Mexico. How big is this operation?
Hance: Incredibly large. I think we cataloged something like close to 1,000 individual bikes. It was a little hard to discern exact numbers because the seller would repost ads every single day. But I did write some code to crunch the numbers and figure out the unique number of bikes. And I think we came down to somewhere close to right around 1,000.
Again, because he was posting prices, it gave us a really interesting look at the economics of a black market that we don’t really have a whole lot of information on. So we crunched the numbers. How much do we think he’s making a month? How much did he make this year? There were some months that he would post $60,000 to $80,000 worth of bikes, because he had a real affinity for the high end stuff. I’ve been doing this for 20 years. This is the largest in terms of numbers, in terms of cash, and in terms of audacity that we’ve ever seen.
Miller: Do you have a sense for how they were sent to Mexico in the first place?
Hance: We do. I, unfortunately, can’t answer that question. I’m gonna have to dodge that one. I’m sorry. What eventually ended up happening is that the bad guy, so to speak, screwed up and posted something he should not have posted on his Facebook page during one of his sales. And that led to a name. And that name led to a location in San Jose. And I’m gonna leave out a lot of what happened in the middle. But eventually, police caught this guy and found not only bikes that were packaged for sale, but a large [amount of] cash was seized in a bag – hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash – which then kicked it up to the Feds, [and] then just ground slowly through the court system over the last couple of years. I’m sorry I have to be sort of intentionally vague here, but there’s certain things I can’t touch upon.
Miller: Well, I appreciate that and there are some details that are mentioned in the Wired article that I mentioned. For example, they say there that an accomplice that you identified in the Bay Area, the police officers were able to find stolen bike parts in his shop. And a man named Victor Romero was indicted in Federal court this year, finally, after years of following a bust. But that article notes that it was a limited indictment and did not mention the man that you have identified as the kingpin here.
Hance: Yes.
Miller: But you’re being circumspect now because it seems like there is some other potential criminal prosecution that might be underway?
Hance: Because Romero is under indictment and that is an ongoing court case, I really don’t want to talk about that a whole ton. But yeah, we did identify the, sort of, middle man that we believe was operating with the kingpin. And he is being charged in Federal court. The indictment against him is what was disappointing. Not only because it listed a very small number of bicycles – we’re looking at three or four digits worth of bikes. And I think that indictment mentions nine bicycles. I get the mechanics behind that. It’s a certain jurisdiction, a certain dollar amount. There’s certain variables that they’re trying to meet for prosecution.
But the whole thing was such a pale shadow of what was actually going on. That’s why we published what we published. There are hundreds of other victims, thousands more bikes. Again, nobody touched the kingpin. After Romero was arrested, we watched the kingpin. We basically choked off his supply in California and we saw his supply move to San Diego. And then we saw his supply move to Southern Oregon.
And then I started seeing bikes from Portland, which is when my head exploded. Because I was seeing bikes with stickers from bike shops that I frequent, shops I know people at. And I was talking to some of these victims and I looked at them on Facebook. We have mutual friends. So the experience of talking to someone on the phone here in Portland saying, “Hey, I’m looking at your bike and your bike is currently in Jalisco, Mexico.” That, to me, was when it really got serious for me.
Miller: And it’s worth it because you had thought that you had choked off this criminal enterprise. But instead, it seems that authorities, so far, have just sliced off one head of a hydra?
Hance: And that speaks to this guy’s audacity. We killed his supply in one state and he was able to seamlessly shift his supply to another state. We’re watching him right now, as we speak, source bikes from a certain area in Colorado through an individual. I’m not gonna say where, but it’s another individual in Mexico. He just replaced guy number one with guy number two. That’s all that’s happened.
And despite the press, despite the indictment, despite us attempting to engage with Facebook for, literally, years, despite friends of friends introducing us to people at Meta, there’s literally nothing we haven’t done to try to bring this to Facebook’s attention and say, hey, can you just do the right damn thing? Kill this guy’s account. Kill his market. Don’t let him make money off your platform. Nothing has happened. He posted a new bike last night. He’s still operating.
Miller: You know, people talk about para-social relationships, a kind of one-sided relationship that can be significant for you, with some musician that you’re a fan of. They don’t know you but you know them. I’m wondering if you feel like you have that with this bike theft kingpin?
Hance: Yes. For lack of a better word, yes. After watching this individual for so long and seeing his way, seeing his methods, examining his social media, basically performing lots of OSINT – which is short for open-source intelligence – on this guy to figure out who he is, what he does. How does he do what he does? Yeah, I feel like I know this guy quite, quite well and I don’t like him.
Miller: You mentioned your inability so far to get gigantic social media companies to stop opening their platform to this kingpin. So that’s one piece of this. But there are also the customers. If he has sold a million dollars or more of stolen bicycles worth, maybe tens of millions of dollars, it’s because people are buying them. Do you get the sense that a lot of these folks actually know that they’re buying stolen bikes?
Hance: We’ve had people reach out, after we do stories like this, from Mexico. And in broken English [they] say, “Hey, my buddy sent me this link and I just realized I have your stolen bike. I’m in Mexico City. How can I get this back to you?” And that’s amazing. I think there is probably a large portion of his customers who know exactly what he’s doing.
But at the same time, there’s not really a whole lot of dealers. And he runs a great business. I gotta hand it to him. He’s got an amazing supply. There’s tons of demand. He ships all over the country. He does customer service. He’s got branded hats. For all intents and purposes, these platforms let this guy look like a business, a “capital B” business.
And I think if I was an 18 year old kid and I wanted a $5,000 bike, and I couldn’t afford it, and I could get it for a grand off [from] some dude in Jalisco, and I lived in Mexico City, yeah, that’d be real tempting. I get that. I think it’s probably 50-50. 50% [of his customers] just see an ad that he puts out there and think, “Oh, I can get this sick bike for less money. That’s awesome.” But people who are sort of in the community and people who know what’s what, and know a dollar value of some of the stuff that he’s moving, it’s impossible not to see it. It’d be impossible not to know.
Miller: We started by talking about the thefts that you experienced in Arizona and, I think, elsewhere. How have bike thefts evolved over the years?
Hance: I think about when I was growing up. I rode bikes all through college and I rode bikes in high school. I wasn’t a “capital C” cyclist that I am now that I live in Portland, Oregon. But they just weren’t worth as much. Things like the giant boom in E-bikes has just skyrocketed the average bike value that you have out on the streets. When we started Bike Index, we actually asked and calculated what an “average” bike was stolen in 2021 versus 2023. And when we started way back in 2013, it was right about $1,000. Right now it’s at $1,785 and that is almost due completely to E-bikes. So they’re more expensive. There’s more of them out there. [With] the pandemic, we saw a huge boom in cycling, which is awesome.
It used to be if you stole something like this, let’s say back in the ‘80s, you had two places you could get rid of it. You could get rid of it at a pawn shop and you could get rid of it at a flea market. Now, it’s not like [that]. Is there an app for me to get rid of this thing? There are 47 different sales apps. There’s Facebook Marketplace, which is terrible. There’s OfferUp, which is worse. There is Letgo. There’s this whole constellation of online sales apps that don’t care if you use a fake name. They don’t care if you post this obviously stolen thing. There’s zero customer service. There’s zero enforcement.
So it’s this really bad mix of having so many more of these things out there that are worth so much more money. And there’s endless ways for you to anonymously fence them and get rid of them if you’re a criminal, usually with complete anonymity and within a matter of hours. So the whole thing adds up to a really, really bad equation, which is why bike theft has skyrocketed so much, I would say, in the last decade.
Miller: What’s your best advice for people who don’t want their bikes to be stolen?
Hance: In 2024, don’t trust your apartment building. I cannot tell you how many surveillance footage we’ve seen of these guys rolling into apartment buildings at three o’clock in the morning. They’re carrying power tools and extension cords. And they are not in a hurry. Because they know they’re in the basement of this giant building in a big concrete room. No one can hear them down there. And a lot of the apartments that have been constructed within the last decade have a “secure” bike room. You have to keep your bikes down there. We’ll watch these guys roll into buildings like that and just walk out with tens of thousands of dollars of bikes, and then come back the next Tuesday and do it again.
So it is a little weird. It is hyper-specific when in 2024 my advice is, if you live in an apartment building and that apartment building tells you [that] you have to keep your bike in the bike room, no, you don’t. You should not because we just see it as the lowest hanging fruit for criminals who know exactly where to go and exactly what to look for.
One of the craziest things we ever saw was a criminal who was in the process of robbing a bike room, and he took the time to take out his phone and snap the pictures that he would use on the online ad when he listed the bike an hour later. So he hadn’t even stolen the thing yet. He was in the process of stealing it. But he had had the foresight to whip his phone out and take a picture so he could use it in the Marketplace listing. And when we found it online and sent that to the victim, the victim said, “Yeah, you know, my lock is still on there.” Five minutes later, he had power-sawed it off. That’s pretty audacious.
Miller: Bryan Hance, thank you, and thank you for the work you’re doing.
Hance: Thank you very much for having me.
Miller: Bryan Hance is a Portlander, co-founder of the non-profit and website, Bike Index.
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