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How two cyclists tracked down a stolen bike and actually got it back

With some Google Maps sleuthing and persuasive messages to the police, the enterprising riders managed to become a statistical anomaly.

Jonny Long
by Jonny Long 06.11.2024 Photography by
Harry Gray
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One bicycle is stolen every seven minutes in England and Wales. In the United States, some estimates suggest a bike goes missing every 30 seconds.

Statistics like these can be hard to wrap your head around, so here’s an easier one: of all the bikes stolen in England, 90% are never found, and only 2% of stolen bike cases end up with the thief being charged.

This means if you get your bike stolen, it’s almost certainly gone forever. But it also means there are outliers. One such outlier, part of this 2% club even, is Harry Gray and the stolen bike of his friend Alisdair “Ali” Bayman.

“Grim news,” Ali, who lives in London, had messaged his group chat on Monday morning. “[My] Cannondale got stolen from the flat last night in the hallway. Biggest RIP of the cycling career so far.”

200 miles north in Manchester, Harry thought he might as well quickly check the online marketplace Gumtree to see if the thief was stupid enough to immediately list the stolen bike. Turns out, he was.

The advert for the stolen bike.
The advert for the stolen bike.

“I’ve not had a bike stolen before but I have thought about what I would do if I had one stolen,” Harry told Escape Collective.

Switching internet tabs, Harry trawled Reddit to find some tips about what other people had done when they had their bikes stolen, and how they managed to get the police to seriously investigate a non-violent crime.

“Make sure you get the address, [and] prove you own the bike,” Harry told us. Harry messaged the seller, falsely telling him he would be coming down from Manchester to have a look, which lowered the suspect’s guard enough to hand over his address. Comparing the photos of the bike to images on Google Maps, Harry and Ali managed to drill down to the specific building the bike was in via the brickwork and window ledge.

They then called up the police to let them know they had tracked down the stolen property and the location it was being held at. Originally, Harry says, the police were still not going to do much but that changed when Harry told them they’d arranged to go and meet the thief and so an officer was sent to go along in order to “keep the peace.”

Once Ali and the police were there, the thief had seemingly become spooked because he didn’t pick up the phone, so the police used an emergency key to gain access to the common area in the building and managed to find the location using the photos posted online. Ali had proved the bike was his because the carbon wheels and mudguards were distinctive enough to be identifying features, and once they’d found the bike, as well as others that had been nicked, the police sent for backup and found the thief’s flat and arrested him.

“I think there was an element of luck in finding the exact flat,” Harry said. “Maybe the police were aware of him before.”

While this was going on, Harry was sat patiently in his flat in Manchester, waiting for updates.

“He’d not replied for 20 minutes so I was a bit nervous, and you’re just waiting for him to come out the other side of the situation. I was nervous, [Ali] was dead nervous but with the police there he was a bit better,” Harry explained.

“The plan was actually to just go buy it off him if there wasn’t any police because we didn’t have the confidence really to go take it back off him. It was only in the last few hours when the police said they were gonna turn up that we changed tack and we thought we can just get this now because the police are coming.”

The bike after being recovered (Photo: Harry Gray).
The bike after being recovered (Photo: Harry Gray).

With clear powers of both sleuthing to find the bike and persuasion to actually get the police to turn up, has Harry considered setting up a very specific private detective agency?

“I don’t think so as you probably come up against a lot of people, it only takes one person to be violent in these situations so you know, like, it’s probably not the best work to go into,” Harry answered. “But obviously everything we did was just open source information that was available to the police. They can utilise anything that we used to solve crimes, so you know it’s almost a bit ridiculous that the police don’t do this themselves. So much theft is operated by a small number of people and especially with Apple AirTags and stuff now it’s just made it so easy to track down criminals like this. So, really, they don’t have any excuse anymore.”

As well as being in the 10% of people who manage to recover a stolen bike, they join the 2% club too, as the suspect has been charged with handling stolen goods and is due to appear in Magistrates Court next week.

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