On a fall day in 2021, Erin Dallin locked his cherished baby blue bicycle to a rack near the University of Washington light-rail station in Seattle. When he returned hours later, only the front wheel remained.
Dallin was livid. He posted on a Facebook page for Seattle-area victims of bike theft, asking others to keep an eye out for his missing bike. As the days passed, Dallin began to lose hope. He filed an insurance claim and bought a new bike.
Then, weeks later, his bike resurfaced on OfferUp, a leading marketplace for used goods. The bright blue color and scratches on the frame were unmistakable. Someone was selling his stolen bike.
Online platforms such as OfferUp, Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist revolutionized the resale industry — and at the same time created exchanges where it’s easier to peddle stolen goods than in physical settings.
Bikes are valuable and often simple to steal, making them a hot target in cycling hubs like Seattle. Now surging thefts have inspired grassroots efforts for tracking ownership and recovering stolen bikes — but some say the marketplaces need to do more.
“I think the platforms should be responsible for making sure they’re not selling stolen bikes,” Dallin said, “and if that challenge is too hard, they should get out of the business.”
When Dallin discovered his bike was listed for sale, he contacted OfferUp’s investigations team. He didn’t hear back, but the listing and seller were pulled from the site. Then Dallin noticed the bike listed again under a different name, and he made a second report to the platform.
The bike was soon marked as sold.
“If this bicycle was sold, it wasn’t sold on OfferUp,” said Nathan Garnett, general counsel for the company.
The Bellevue, Wash.-based company took steps to prevent the sale, he said, but does not publicly disclose those actions because it could undermine their effectiveness. Garnett said there were no messages exchanged between the seller and potential buyers. OfferUp also reached out to local law enforcement for support regarding both listings and did not get a response, he said.
“We took all of the appropriate actions,” Garnett said, and as far as they know, the seller is no longer active on the site.
But Dallin’s bike was still gone.
A B.C. program’s success
While stopping bike thefts is complicated, at least one effort is making strides. A Vancouver, B.C.-based program called Project 529 reports that it slashed bike theft rates in the city by nearly 70% since launching a decade ago.
J Allard, a former Microsoft executive who helped start Xbox and recently joined Amazon, co-founded Project 529. He doesn’t blame the virtual marketplaces. Instead, he says the lack of a mandatory identification numbers — like the ones that exist for cars and boats — is exacerbating the thefts.
Most bikes have a serial number, but the system is not consistent across brands. Allard’s solution is a tamper-resistant decal with a unique numerical identifier. Project 529 partnered with the Vancouver Police Department early on, hosting registration events to get more bikes in the system and giving police officers access to the Project 529 database to help them return stolen bikes.
The effort is expanding and making gains in other communities. Several law enforcement agencies in California have partnered with Project 529, and in Denver, Colo., the city’s police department reported a 30% decrease in bike theft one year after adopting the program.
Rob Brunt, a former Vancouver police officer who now works for Project 529, said it could work for Seattle, too. But Brunt said the group hasn’t gotten traction with decision-makers in the city’s government or law enforcement.
In response to questions from GeekWire, the Seattle Police Department said it handles stolen bikes like any other stolen property, doing its best to return the item if the owner can provide its make, model and serial number. A spokesperson said SPD previously had a bike registration program, but it has been inactive for more than 15 years.
Thefts keep mounting
In the meantime, Seattle cyclists are getting hammered by thefts. Nearly 1,000 bikes have been reported stolen within 20 miles of Seattle so far this year, according to Bike Index, a San Francisco, Calif., nonprofit that is similar to Project 529.
Bike Index claims more than 1 million bikes registered worldwide, helping to recover nearly 15,000 stolen bikes. Co-founder Bryan Hance has a long history of fighting bike theft in his spare time, originally launching a stolen bike registry 20 years ago.
Unlike Allard, Hance said online resale platforms are central to the problem.
“OfferUp is pretty much the dominant problem,” he said.
On OfferUp, Hance said it’s too easy for sellers to hide behind fake names and duplicate accounts, and that there’s nowhere to leave feedback alerting potential buyers that a seller is dealing in stolen goods.
“At the very least, just mandate that people [selling bikes] have to post a picture of the serial number of the bike,” said Hance.
It’s not a perfect fix, he acknowledged, but it’s a start. Including serial numbers would make it easier for owners to identify their bikes from marketplace listings and report sellers pushing stolen goods.
Efforts by OfferUp
Garnett said he is not aware of any data showing there are more stolen goods on OfferUp than other platforms.
“OfferUp is a place where it is easy to buy and sell, period,” said Garnett. Tens of millions of items are sold on the site every year, he continued, so if even a small fraction of them are stolen, it adds up.
OfferUp’s popularity in the Seattle area could create the impression that more stolen bikes are appearing on the site versus Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist, Garnett added. But he maintains that the company does more than competitors to protect users, including employing a dedicated trust-and-safety team of about 20 people spanning several divisions.
“We invest a lot of effort, money, time and personnel into trust and safety issues on the platform,” said Garnett. It’s not a legal requirement, he said, but a “moral obligation.”
Last year, OfferUp received 250,000 reports from users flagging items they suspected were stolen or counterfeit. During the same period, the company detected and removed 1 million items and disabled more than 10,000 accounts based on internal review methods.
There are anti-crime actions being taken that platform users don’t see, Garnett said. If criminals realize they’ve been spotted, they might move to other accounts.
As for serial number verification, Garnett said it’s a “very challenging data problem,” and that the company is working on a solution that will launch when ready for widespread use. He said that including identification numbers in listings could have “some deterrent impact” on crime.
Vigilante BRAT
For now, Seattle-area bike theft victims are taking matters into their own hands.
After Dallin’s bike was stolen at the light-trail station, he connected with the Bike Recovery Action Teams or BRAT, a volunteer-powered group run by a retired public school teacher named Tracy.
Through her self-proclaimed “weird retirement hobby,” Tracy estimates that she has helped recover up to 500 bikes over more than five years. They range from titanium road bikes to tandem e-bikes and even a $78 Frozen-themed two-wheeler. (GeekWire agreed to publish only Tracy’s first name given the risks involved with her group’s actions.)
Tracy peruses online marketplaces and is adept at recognizing the signs of a stolen bike, such as e-bikes missing their chargers, a seller claiming to post on behalf of a parent or relative, and frame damage consistent with destroying a lock.
When she suspects a theft, Tracy poses as an interested buyer and arranges a meetup. She verifies that the bike being sold matches the description of the stolen one, and then challenges the seller to relinquish it. Tracy said she has helped the police track down and arrest prolific thieves on several occasions.
“She should have worked for the CIA,” said Hance, of Bike Index. In order to get a bike back, he said, “she comes up with these crazy, elaborate ruses.”
Garnett said it was “super dangerous” for people to confront potential criminals, but acknowledged that it’s hard to get law enforcement to respond to these thefts given their resource constraints.
Dallin turned to BRAT and Tracy when the bike he bought to replace his stolen bike was also taken by thieves. They successfully recovered the bike, and now he spends his free time scoping out suspicious listings online and looking for their owners on Bike Index.
Hance said Tracy’s bike recovery efforts are amazing — but he regrets their necessity.
“The whole thing is, she shouldn’t have to do that,” he said. “The platform should.”
https://ift.tt/PHZR94j October 02, 2024 at 02:23PM GeekWire
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