Great article about the booming bike stealing business; about $350 million worth of bikes are stolen a year. Whose stealing them and why?
Stolen bicycles have become a solvent in America’s underground economy, a currency in the world of drug addicts and petty thieves. Bikes are portable and easily converted to cash, and they usually vanish without a trace—in some places, only 5 percent are even reported stolen.
But my favorite nugget from the article is this:
Pegasus Technologies, a company in California, created a long-distance system for tracking bikes, which Sacramento police installed in the handlebars of a bait bike. It worked: when the wired bicycle was stolen, police located it across town and arrested the thief. Four months later, they tried it again; the same guy stole the same bike, threw it in a pool, and left the cops a note: “You got jacked U punk motherfucker.”
