How One Man Makes Millions Trafficking Stolen Bikes & No One Can Stop Him

While investigating bike theft for a video, we spoke with Bryan Hance, a U.S.-based cybersecurity expert and co-founder of Bike Index, a nonprofit dedicated to recovering stolen bikes. With years of experience, he’s seen it all—but his biggest case took nearly four years to unpick, exposing a single man behind a $2.1 million bike trafficking operation. 😳 Bryan gives us a peek into the case & reflects on what it means more generally for cycling.

⏱️ Timestamps: ⏱️
00:00 Bryan Hance’s biggest case
01:12 How this all began…
03:38 How are all these bikes ending up in Mexico? 🔎
04:18 His big mistake
05:14 What did the police do?
07:40 What happened to him?
08:09 What role do services & platforms play in bike crime?
12:29 Without support, how did Bryan stay motivated?
13:31 Takeaways

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Isn’t this crazy? What did you think of everything Bryan exposed? 🤯 Let us know down in the comments!

Watch more on GCN…
📹 We Had A Bike Stolen And This Is What Happened Next 👉 https://youtu.be/S0NRo0uoehw?si=oRk9WD56ODQgHBNh
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Luxx – Out To The World

#gcn #cycling #roadcycling #roadbike #bike #bikes #bikelife #crime #truecrime #theft #robbery #biketheft #stolen #stolenbike #blackmarket #fakebikes #tracking #police #fbi #crimestory

📸 Photos – © Velo Collection (TDW) / Getty Images & © Sirotti Images

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we made a video recently where we investigated bike theft trying to see what happens after your bike is stolen as part of that I spoke to Brian HT a us-based cyber security expert and co-founder of bike index a nonprofit bike registry that aims to reunite Stolen Bikes with their rightful owners now in his work of many many years Brian has seen it all playing his part in recovering nearly $30 million worth of Stolen Bikes now most of those thefts as a result of lowlevel often drug related crime but occasionally bigger and darker cases emerg the biggest and darkest of them took Brian nearly four years to unpick for the four years that we watched him because he would post the price and we put that into Google Sheets $2.1 million meanwhile you have these Services over here getting absolutely rich look how bad this guy is just do your job and get rid of this guy this is the story of how but also why even after Federal investigations the pipeline still flows so we got this message in 2020 that was like Hey I’m a cyclist in Mexico I’m looking at your bike with this guy in halisco Mexico which is like 2,000 miles away from where you are not only does he have yours but he has a whole bunch of other ones and this guy only sells stolin leave my name out of it I don’t want any more part in this but like you might want to have a look at this um and to me it was super interesting because a it was kind of hard to find the guy’s P he was doing all this stuff to sort of keep Americans from seeing his page Facebook actually lets you set like a geographic filter where you can say like I only want people in this country to see my content people in America or Venezuela like those people don’t so he had locked it to Mexico um so we we got a VPN in and started looking around and it was like match match match match match match match match like normally we we’ll see these guys online they maybe have two three four bikes but this guy was like we got to 20 and I was like okay this is this is a bigger this is a bigger deal um and the really interesting part of it was the the distance and that like it was such a small like you draw a 100 miles around San Francisco it was it was all these different places but they all wound up with this one guy for a while we were like well is like he robbing people or we didn’t we had to kind of piece it together and first of all it was difficult just to capture everything this guy had because he’d been operating for years so it was like we we scraped his Facebook page then we got into his Instagram and we sort of made this giant we were like let’s just collect as much as we can now so we can look at it and analyze it and then we started talking to these victims and we were getting things like uh CCTV surveillance and we would see different robbers but all the bikes wound up with this guy so we sort of formed an idea like okay well maybe he’s like there’s a pipeline here and like he’s at the tail end of this pipeline but but all these Rob and stuff that are happening over here we’re not we’re not quite sure what happens in the middle yet and the other crazy thing was the speed with which like we talked to people that got robbed on Monday and on Tuesday morning that bike was already listed for sale in Mexico which you know at first we thought like that’s impossible like this guy can’t and it sort of became apparent like oh what’s what’s happening is the bikes are still in America because you can kind of there’s some things in the pictures in the backgrounds that really really make it look we think we’re pretty sure this is in California but like two weeks later the same bike would be posted again but it was in a brand new setting and it was at this dude’s house in Mexico so we started putting together like okay so how how’s that work like you get robbed on Monday and less than 12 hours later your bike is already listed for sale in Mexico and and what eventually the picture that eventually came out was he had a guy in h San Jose which is not super far from San Francisco that was buying from robbers buying from thieves but he was he’s a black market dude who would all these all these different burglary guys knew if you have a bike go to this guy he’s paying well and he’ll take it off your hands um and we we figur we eventually we kind of knew that was going on but we didn’t have the big picture until one day the Mexican guy screwed up and he posted a picture and that picture included the name a name at the top and he he had a Facebook follower of that same name and once we started looking at this Facebook follower he like he owns this shop and like a lot of the a lot of the imagery on this guy’s page sort of matched what we thought we were seeing like same wall same color same floor same even though we didn’t get the exact same spot we’re like we’re pretty sure this is the guy um and we we waited until that guy also screwed up and and normally he would take pictures against this completely sort of blank industrial wall no details no nothing no accidental shots of the street no and then one day he took a picture in a completely different place and it sort of showed the interior it showed these shelving and it showed this stuff where it was like oh no now we’re 100% sure it’s this guy and we we had been talking I mean we I probably talked to 50 cops over the course of two years and most of them blew us off and we’re like look we’re not interpole dude we’re you know like I I work in San Francisco what it’s it’s interesting but there’s I can’t help I just this is not my my jurisdiction but we eventually found one guy who his interest was because he was working in the burglary Wing he he had all these robberies when people got robbed he was looking at that data and we sort of had the tail end of it and when we sort of showed up and said look I think we found the middleman he unbeknownst to me actually dug into it super hard and did all this amazing work and actually like served a search warrant on the guy and he was like oh yeah this is the guy like not only is this the guy but we we got like 200,000 cash and he had bikes stacked up it caught him red-handed I don’t know if it was because of the money or because it was a crossborder thing he gave that to the FBI uh which is sort of like you have this local police force and you have our like Federal stuff up here and like the little local cop just went here you go or like I don’t I don’t know what the reason was but it became a a federal case which is which over here is a is a really big deal it’s way worse to get charged by the federal government than it is just like a little little City local government we continuing to watch this guy’s operation and we were like happy that you know we got one of the bad guys but the crazy thing is the Mexican guy never stopped he just he found another guy in a different city and did the same thing and then he found another guy in a different city so we were see all of a sudden bikes went from like Bay Area San Francisco and suddenly it was San Jose and then it was the state of Oregon where I live which is nuts and then like there was a point that I was actually seeing bikes from my hometown with shops stickers from bike shops that I’ve been to that I know dudes that work at that that this dude in Mexico you know so I’m like I’m seeing a bike that was like a mile that way at a shop that I go to to get worked like my bikes worked on I’m looking at a picture of that bike in helisa Mexico now I’m super pissed off I’m really angry over this guy um and the to make a long story short what sucks is like yeah the the guy in San Jose is probably going to go to jail or like something very bad is going to happen to this guy but because the Mexican guy is in Mexico they there’s nothing they can do they they unless he wants to drive up to America and get caught no one’s they can’t really touch him he must be loaded as well now like yeah for the four years that we watched him because he would post the price and we put that into Google Sheets uh $2.1 million is what we what we saw him we don’t know like it’s not 100% profit because clearly he had to like pay for trucks and he had some head but we we don’t we don’t know but in the like four years that we watched him we watched him sell $2 million that he wild isn’t it yeah which is crazy the issue here is not with law enforcement it’s with the services who provide a platform for criminals to sell stolen goods in public to Brian’s mind we are talking about household names here some of the online Giants even after the wired article even after a bunch of other articles even after I’ve give talks even after this Federal indictment even like billions and billions all we wanted was for somebody at Facebook to do their job kick this guy off their platform and his market up we don’t we didn’t we didn’t want him to be able to make money so easily and you know we talked to Facebook forever as well and they just they wouldn’t do anything they just they were completely useless um their responses were just so weird because it’s like you know we we have invented Frankenstein’s monster we can’t control it like I would I would love to say that I can just hit a button and get rid of this guy I can’t uh you know I I reported it to our security team and I’d say well what happens next and they say well I don’t know I can’t tell you and I’m like well what the does that mean like um we we would just get these responses from these people and that it all basically boiled down to yeah I’m a senior VP of product or security or safety or whatever I literally don’t have the power or ability to do the thing that you’re telling me even though I personally acknowledge holy this guy is super bad he should not be on our platform we should get rid of this guy um and it was a real eyeopener uh that was basically like we have we have created the monster we cannot control the monster thank you for your report like thanks for using Facebook and that like that was pretty depressing as well we talked to another guy who we had amassed like all this evidence and screenshots and court cases and pictures and we had this sort of private page that we would send to people saying look how bad this guy is here’s the evidence here’s the proof just do your job and get rid of this guy I I talked to this one engineer who was like well you know this is a real problem not only with bikes but with other things on our platform like we’re hoping to solve it with artificial intelligence and I’m like well we’re giving you actual intelligence like actual analyzed data with proof and like so I don’t I don’t know what that means I don’t know why we having this conversation if if if you’re going to turn a blind eye to like 34 gigs of actual intelligence and blow smoke up my ass and say you’re G to solve this with AI like you’re you’re just you’re a liar and you’re boring you know I I just there’s we can’t have this we can’t continue this conversation like all these Services it’s on them um they have you know Facebook makes more money than Brazil every year like and for them to say well we don’t have the resources to police our it’s it’s bull like of course they have the resources to to police their platforms um and services like offer up gum tree Craigslist like they all they all sort of turn a blind eye to this like yeah you have a button where you can report but there’s really nobody that reads those and there’s nothing that prevents that bad guy from coming back the next day and just doing the same exact damn thing all these Services sort of say well we’re just a big Post-it board we’re legally all we are we connect buyer and seller we don’t get involved with all that other stuff like we’re innocent we’re innocent my big thought is like not everything has to be a law enforcement problem they don’t have enough people to deal with it meanwhile you have these Services over here getting absolutely rich over over these sales that they’re hooking up and they’re like oh couldn’t possibly ever take a look at the bad guy like the fault sits squarely with the services crimes that those guys are concentrating on are so bad and so much bigger this sort of thing is so low that they just don’t they’re like this is this is our 10,000th priority you know we have we just seize like an entire truck full of Crystal math LAX like that’s what we’re focusing on where it’s kind of hard to get down to the bikes level um but we hoped just from a from a term of sheer numbers by having you know every single day of every single week of every single month having victims show up and say over here over here over here over here over here look over here look over here look how bad they are that at some point they would sort of wake up and and realize like the scope of the problem uh but to this date like nobody’s nobody’s done anything you’re a big Corporation and you have lawyers and you can Lobby and you you represent a big brand and and and they’ll listen to you if you’re guys like you and me nobody cares that’s that’s the that’s the that’s the truth of it how how do you feel then having been like working in this area it’s like your passion project right bike index seems like a fantastic like resource for cyclist yeah do you after all this time feel like empowered to keep doing what you’re doing or do you feel a little bit like uh I actually got super burned out and basically quit working for bike index I uh there there was some other stuff going on at the time unrelated to this Mexican thing that uh I mean I’ve been at this for like 24 years and I’ve made zero money and meanwhile I’ve watched this bad guy make millions of dollars and nobody seems to want to touch him uh I have a day job I have like a whole other job that I have to do this is this is like a nights and weekends thing and I just got super burned out um so once once this thing was done I basically walked away from bike index and I still pop in from time to time for friends and do some high priority things but it it really uh I I do not feel empowered I feel super depressed and and annoyed well I don’t know about you but I think the whole story is absolutely wild like Brian I feel slightly depressed at the state of things not again from law enforcement but from the inaction of some companies that perhaps you’d think should be a little bit more engaged in issues like this but I suppose what I also am taking from this something really positive is is that there are people like Brian out there who do a fantastic job that they’re not paid to do trying to help other people in the PCL Community getting their beloved biked back and so if nothing else I would encourage you to hit the like button for what Brian has done and what bike index continues to do because that is blooming cool so yeah salute people like Brian out there in the cycling community that are doing their best to make life better for us anyway please get involved in the comments section I’d love to hear your thoughts on this outrageous story and again hit the like button as well if you support what’s been talked about