WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.960 I visited the Facebook campus once. It’s in the Bay Area near San Francisco, California. Yeah, 00:00:05.960 --> 00:00:10.360 I just showed up unannounced and walked around the place. My friend was with me and he had to pee, 00:00:10.360 --> 00:00:14.680 so we looked for a way in, but we couldn’t find any way into the buildings. We were just curious 00:00:14.680 --> 00:00:19.160 what it was like inside, though. But while I was walking around the Facebook campus, 00:00:19.160 --> 00:00:23.720 I saw a bunch of bicycles painted in the Facebook blue with the Facebook 00:00:23.720 --> 00:00:28.680 logo on them. Apparently it’s a thing in Silicon Valley that tech giants like 00:00:28.680 --> 00:00:33.680 Google and Facebook have these bikes around their campus for anyone to use, 00:00:33.680 --> 00:00:37.320 for when you need to get to a meeting in another building. Just hop on one of the company bikes 00:00:37.320 --> 00:00:42.360 and take it where you want. It makes it super convenient to get around their large campuses. 00:00:42.360 --> 00:00:48.960 Well, since I was there and I saw these bikes, I decided to hop on one and go for a ride. They 00:00:48.960 --> 00:00:52.680 aren’t locked or have any code or anything. They’re just sitting there for anyone to use. 00:00:52.680 --> 00:00:57.640 Dozens of them are all over the campus. So, I hopped on one and I rode it around, 00:00:57.640 --> 00:01:02.120 zooming down sidewalks, ripping around corners, and for a brief moment, I felt 00:01:02.120 --> 00:01:08.160 like a Facebook employee, whizzing by other people I presumed to be employees. Nobody said anything, 00:01:08.160 --> 00:01:12.840 and I left the bike on the other side of the campus. As I spent more time in Silicon Valley, 00:01:12.840 --> 00:01:17.520 I saw more and more of these bikes all over the place. People had ridden bikes from the 00:01:17.520 --> 00:01:23.440 Google campus over to the HP campus, or you’d see Facebook bikes over at the Cisco offices. 00:01:23.440 --> 00:01:28.000 The bikes were scattered all over town, and I presume it’s because people ride them 00:01:28.000 --> 00:01:31.680 from office to office, and maybe they’re inside doing some meeting or something, 00:01:31.680 --> 00:01:36.000 and they’ll ride back later. But the thing I couldn’t understand was — this being so close 00:01:36.000 --> 00:01:41.280 to San Jose and the Bay Area and these bikes just sitting right out front with no chain or 00:01:41.280 --> 00:01:47.160 lock — why aren’t these bikes stolen the very moment someone walks away from it? I mean, 00:01:47.160 --> 00:01:51.960 I didn’t just ride one; I rode a handful. It became a thing. Every time I saw one around, 00:01:51.960 --> 00:01:57.320 I’d hop on it for a little joyride. So, if I could jump on them so easily and ride off 00:01:57.320 --> 00:02:06.137 wherever I wanted, what’s stopping anyone from just stealing them all? 00:02:06.137 --> 00:02:08.480 (INTRO): [INTRO MUSIC] These are true stories from the dark side of 00:02:08.480 --> 00:02:31.880 the internet. I’m Jack Rhysider. This is Darknet Diaries. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS] 00:02:31.880 --> 00:02:35.440 Content warning; since a lot of you appreciate me telling you that there 00:02:35.440 --> 00:02:39.160 are swear words, this episode has a lot of swear words in it. So, maybe, I don’t know, 00:02:39.160 --> 00:02:44.440 listen with headphones or whatever it is you do when swear words come on the show. You ready? 00:02:44.440 --> 00:02:46.320 Mm-hm. 00:02:46.320 --> 00:02:48.200 What kind of — what name should we use for you? 00:02:48.200 --> 00:02:53.120 You can call me Bryan. It’s okay. I don’t — I’m not cool enough to have a nom de guerre. 00:02:53.120 --> 00:02:55.020 Bryan, have you ever got your bike stolen? 00:02:55.020 --> 00:02:56.280 I have indeed, yes. 00:02:56.280 --> 00:02:58.120 Tell me about it. 00:02:58.120 --> 00:03:04.040 [Music] The worst one, the one that I remember with the most pain, was a Cannondale 00:03:04.040 --> 00:03:10.200 M300. It was a mountain bike. It was one of the first I’d really spent a decent amount of money 00:03:10.200 --> 00:03:15.320 on. This is back when I was at the University of Arizona and I had this crappy little shotgun 00:03:15.320 --> 00:03:20.360 apartment where everything was stored in the front. The shower was all the way in the back. I 00:03:20.360 --> 00:03:24.480 came home one day, I went and took a shower, and I walk out into the front of my apartment. I’m like, 00:03:24.480 --> 00:03:28.920 something is different. Somebody had come in the front door while I was in the shower… 00:03:28.920 --> 00:03:29.480 What? 00:03:29.480 --> 00:03:33.200 …and robbed me, and then taken the bike and taken off on the bike. 00:03:33.200 --> 00:03:34.120 While you were showering? 00:03:34.120 --> 00:03:35.260 While I was showering. 00:03:35.260 --> 00:03:36.520 How is this possible? 00:03:36.520 --> 00:03:42.440 I don’t know, but it was — that’s the one — that was one of many, but that’s the one that 00:03:42.440 --> 00:03:48.320 finally broke my brain, and I just — to this day, whenever I see a Cannondale M300 going 00:03:48.320 --> 00:03:53.560 down the road and I’m like, son of a bitch. I remember — like, it really sticks with me. 00:03:53.560 --> 00:03:57.020 I can’t believe somebody came in your apartment to do it while you were showering. 00:03:57.020 --> 00:03:59.200 But yeah, that one hurt. 00:03:59.200 --> 00:04:01.420 So, did you try looking for that bike? 00:04:01.420 --> 00:04:02.740 I did, I did. 00:04:02.740 --> 00:04:03.540 Where’d you look? 00:04:03.540 --> 00:04:09.200 I mean, you look around. You physically look around. We kinda knew where the dodgy spots 00:04:09.200 --> 00:04:17.000 were, and every single — if you’ve ever had something like that stolen from you, any time 00:04:17.000 --> 00:04:21.280 you’re out, if you see one that’s even remotely the shade of — the hairs on the back of your 00:04:21.280 --> 00:04:26.720 neck stand up and you’re always thinking, is that it? Is that it? You go scope it out, like — but 00:04:26.720 --> 00:04:31.320 there wasn’t much. You watched — back then, it was Craigslist. You watched Craigslist, you could talk 00:04:31.320 --> 00:04:35.634 to local bike shops, and you could physically just go run around looking for the damn thing, but… 00:04:35.634 --> 00:04:36.560 What about the police? 00:04:36.560 --> 00:04:44.200 That wasn’t really a thing, and that was sort of — you know, college towns — there’s campus 00:04:44.200 --> 00:04:49.920 police and there’s city police, and I did report it with the campus police, but it was like — and 00:04:49.920 --> 00:04:53.040 I asked somebody; I was like, so, what happens if the city picks it up? They’re like, oh no, 00:04:53.040 --> 00:04:56.200 you’re on your own. You have to go report to them, too. You could see this sort of — there 00:04:56.200 --> 00:05:00.940 were two silos, you know? They’re two systems that didn’t talk to each other. This is stupid. 00:05:00.940 --> 00:05:05.080 Bryan was frustrated that there was little to no help for him, and he knew it 00:05:05.080 --> 00:05:08.800 wasn’t just him who had a stolen bike. Lots of people must feel frustrated like this, 00:05:08.800 --> 00:05:12.720 too. Like, what do you do, go to every bike and pawn shop in town, 00:05:12.720 --> 00:05:17.280 give them the serial number and say, hey, call me if anyone tries to sell you this bike here, 00:05:17.280 --> 00:05:21.960 and then call the police and the campus police and put up posters around town? 00:05:21.960 --> 00:05:25.840 It’s really hard to spread the word that your bike got stolen, and here’s what it looks like 00:05:25.840 --> 00:05:29.640 in case you see it. [Music] Surely there’s gotta be a better solution to this problem. 00:05:31.120 --> 00:05:37.720 So, in a way, that bike was kinda the impetus for this whole thing. It was like, 00:05:37.720 --> 00:05:43.600 that’s my origin story, right? ‘Cause this is like, ‘98, ‘99, 2000-ish, 00:05:43.600 --> 00:05:50.840 that era. I was lucky enough to be in computer science. It was right when text messaging was 00:05:50.840 --> 00:05:55.080 still a new — it was like you could — all this tech — like, a lot of free databases were out, 00:05:55.080 --> 00:06:00.080 a lot of people were getting into web development, PHP was — it was this perfect 00:06:00.080 --> 00:06:04.560 storm time of like — some shmuck like me could be like, you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna 00:06:04.560 --> 00:06:09.400 create a bike database for stolen bikes, and I’m gonna tackle this thing. For once, 00:06:09.400 --> 00:06:15.160 all that technology was actually there, and anybody with half a brain could see in five 00:06:15.160 --> 00:06:20.280 years from now that phones are gonna be a way to — and like. You knew, even if you had this crappy 00:06:20.280 --> 00:06:25.240 little website at the start. So, I started this site called Stolen Bicycle Registry. 00:06:25.240 --> 00:06:26.500 What was it — what did it do? 00:06:26.500 --> 00:06:32.040 It literally just let you put in make, model, color, serial, 00:06:32.040 --> 00:06:36.800 add some photos and add a description, and it was the first sort of free open 00:06:36.800 --> 00:06:43.840 database of stolen bikes at that point. I only cared about stolen. I never cared about what 00:06:43.840 --> 00:06:49.120 happened to them before they were stolen. It was purely, everything in this database is stolen. 00:06:49.120 --> 00:06:54.800 His idea is that if your bike is stolen, let him know, and he’ll try to tell everyone around 00:06:54.800 --> 00:06:59.520 town that, hey, before you buy or sell or repair a bicycle, look it up in this database first. 00:07:00.240 --> 00:07:05.160 Basically, it’s a place that’s easy to report a stolen bike to, and one that’s easy to search 00:07:05.160 --> 00:07:09.640 for stolen bikes, too. So, bike shops and pawn shops started appreciating this site, 00:07:09.640 --> 00:07:13.840 to be able to easily check if this bike has been reported stolen. It’s kind of impossible 00:07:13.840 --> 00:07:19.120 to ask every police department in the nation if this bike is stolen. But when there’s a nice, 00:07:19.120 --> 00:07:24.640 simple site online that will tell you, well, that made it easier to check. But really, is this going 00:07:24.640 --> 00:07:29.840 to work? Is anyone actually going to use the site to check if a bike is stolen before buying it? 00:07:29.840 --> 00:07:33.080 Somebody was trying to buy a bike off Craigslist, 00:07:33.080 --> 00:07:35.560 and they ran the serial number, and it was listed on my site. 00:07:35.560 --> 00:07:39.320 He was able to tell the victim, hey, someone found your bike. It’s for sale right 00:07:39.320 --> 00:07:43.780 now on Craigslist. Look. [Music] From there, the victim was able to go get their bike back. 00:07:43.780 --> 00:07:46.000 We got a recovered bike. 00:07:46.000 --> 00:07:51.960 It worked. The site got a stolen bike back to the owner. Sure enough, 00:07:51.960 --> 00:07:56.000 not long after that happened, another stolen bike was found and recovered. 00:07:56.000 --> 00:08:01.000 This was a good idea. The site was working. This gave Bryan fresh energy to work harder 00:08:01.000 --> 00:08:04.700 at spreading the word. He was pumped that he helped two people recover their bikes. 00:08:04.700 --> 00:08:07.480 It’s pretty — it’s amazing. It was pretty great. I mean, 00:08:07.480 --> 00:08:12.520 there’s no money in it, but it’s high karma. It feels really good to just 00:08:12.520 --> 00:08:16.520 have built something that people want to use, and it works well. 00:08:16.520 --> 00:08:21.160 He made it so if you found a stolen bike, you could directly contact the person who lost it. 00:08:21.160 --> 00:08:24.040 At that point, in that site, you could just basically click a button and be like, 00:08:24.040 --> 00:08:26.040 hey dude, I’ve got your bike, and it would shoot an e-mail off to 00:08:26.040 --> 00:08:29.000 the owner and then it would put them in touch. I’m not gonna handle every 00:08:29.000 --> 00:08:33.680 single one of these. It’s just like, finder meet owner. You guys work it out. 00:08:33.680 --> 00:08:38.040 He kept the site going and was helping more and more people find their bikes. After a while, 00:08:38.040 --> 00:08:40.640 it became a lot to keep up with. The site wasn’t 00:08:40.640 --> 00:08:44.820 making any money. It was just a labor of love, and he kinda needed some help. 00:08:44.820 --> 00:08:52.440 Yeah, so, I only ever cared about stolen, and in 2013 — 2012, 2013, 00:08:52.440 --> 00:08:58.400 this bike mechanic in Chicago named Seth Herr ran a Kickstarter that was sort of the opposite. He 00:08:58.400 --> 00:09:02.920 was working in bike shops and he was sick of — they’d sell a bunch of bikes, they’d get stolen, 00:09:02.920 --> 00:09:06.360 people would come back, they’d have to go through physical paper — it just sucked. It was a really 00:09:06.360 --> 00:09:11.240 bad process. He was learning Ruby, and he was sort of coming at it from the other angle, 00:09:11.240 --> 00:09:14.320 which is like, let’s just get these things registered the moment — like, 00:09:14.320 --> 00:09:18.640 the moment I swipe your credit card and go ‘boop’ on my point-of-sale system, I want that bike 00:09:18.640 --> 00:09:23.600 registered. That just solves everybody’s problem. You don’t have to do any work. I don’t have to do 00:09:23.600 --> 00:09:28.680 any work. It just goes into this thing. So, here — I was like, oh, that’s a really cool idea. 00:09:28.680 --> 00:09:32.480 Then he ran a Kickstarter and raised like, fifty grand. I was like, son — motherfucker, 00:09:32.480 --> 00:09:36.200 I’ve been doing this for ten years and no one’s ever donated to me. So, 00:09:36.200 --> 00:09:40.480 I reached out to him and we met and we chatted, and we just realized we’re working on the same 00:09:40.480 --> 00:09:45.880 thing. You’re doing the first part, which is the annoying ‘let’s get humans to do something 00:09:45.880 --> 00:09:49.880 new’ part, but you’re being cool about it by putting it in the point-of-sale systems, 00:09:49.880 --> 00:09:54.760 and it just makes people participate. I’m doing all the weird, nitty-gritty, terrible, black-bag, 00:09:54.760 --> 00:09:58.760 let’s chase bad guy — [music] and neither one of us really gave a shit about our other — like, 00:09:58.760 --> 00:10:03.800 he didn’t want to do stolen stuff, and I didn’t want to do pre-registration stuff. So, 00:10:03.800 --> 00:10:10.000 we joined forces, and it was just — from day one after that, it was just, pew, just success, 00:10:10.000 --> 00:10:15.300 success, success, and we just iteratively built it into a much better system. 00:10:15.300 --> 00:10:21.880 Together, they created the website bikeindex.org, and with the combined forces, 00:10:21.880 --> 00:10:25.640 their reach got a lot wider, which meant more people were using the site and more 00:10:25.640 --> 00:10:28.800 stolen bikes were being recovered. As people were learning about this site, 00:10:28.800 --> 00:10:34.080 they would go on there and check to see if this bike was stolen before buying it off of someone, 00:10:34.080 --> 00:10:37.680 and if there was a hit, they’d tell the bike owner, hey, I think I found your bike. 00:10:37.680 --> 00:10:42.680 You know, we spent ten years just begging people, please use this thing. We’re 00:10:42.680 --> 00:10:47.720 non-profit. It’s free. We love helping people. You love helping your customers. Victims love 00:10:47.720 --> 00:10:52.240 getting their bikes back. Everybody wins. There’s no ‘gotcha’ here, right? You know, 00:10:52.240 --> 00:10:57.920 writing blog posts, doing prep, it was just — ‘cause it only works if a ton of people use it. 00:10:57.920 --> 00:11:00.120 Is it specific cities, or…? 00:11:00.120 --> 00:11:03.800 It’s all — it’s universal. It’s all over the world. I mean, it’s US and Canada-focused, 00:11:03.800 --> 00:11:09.480 but we’ve recovered bikes in Australia and Belgium. There was a real tipping point, 00:11:09.480 --> 00:11:16.600 though, where — I want to say it was maybe 2018, 2019 where it no longer became ‘please, please, 00:11:16.600 --> 00:11:25.120 please use the service’. It became, for me — we have so much data and so much information coming 00:11:25.120 --> 00:11:30.600 our way about — I’m chasing bad guys now. I can tell you — if you come to me and say, 00:11:30.600 --> 00:11:35.440 I got my bike stolen in Seattle, beforehand, it was like, please use Bike Index. Now it’s like, 00:11:35.440 --> 00:11:39.120 no, these are the four motherfuckers you need to keep an eye on. Watch this — these are the 00:11:39.120 --> 00:11:44.600 bad guys in your zipcode, and I know this because we’ve just been looking at these guys for so long. 00:11:44.600 --> 00:11:51.280 We just had so much data about where stuff was getting stolen, where it was popping up, 00:11:51.280 --> 00:11:56.360 who it was popping up with, which ones were going cross — [music] it just switched from like, 00:11:56.360 --> 00:12:03.520 ‘please use my service’ to like, I’m actually now able to discern patterns and do sort of — I 00:12:03.520 --> 00:12:09.040 really can identify some of the flows. The scenario I always tell people is like — so, 00:12:09.040 --> 00:12:14.160 say somebody robs your house on Monday. By Monday night, before you can even make a police report, 00:12:14.160 --> 00:12:17.360 probably, depending on what city you’re in, especially during the pandemic, 00:12:17.360 --> 00:12:21.280 all that shit is already for sale somewhere, typically online. It’s on OfferUp, 00:12:21.280 --> 00:12:28.320 it’s on Facebook Marketplace, it’s on any of these other dodgy sales apps. What happens a 00:12:28.320 --> 00:12:34.800 lot is they take your computers, they take your bikes, they take everything. 00:12:35.640 --> 00:12:42.640 Somebody is scrolling through OfferUp, and it’s like, Joesleazebag420bongmaster7 has 00:12:42.640 --> 00:12:46.920 all this brand-new shit for sale. I think that’s your bike. So, they go to Bike Index, 00:12:46.920 --> 00:12:50.280 they send in a message and says, hey, I was just looking at this super-sketchy dude on OfferUp. 00:12:50.840 --> 00:12:54.560 He’s got your bike. I think he’s — it looks like he has your bike, ‘cause you had listed this bike 00:12:54.560 --> 00:12:58.320 and it looks unique. I was thinking about buying it, but I see that it might be stolen, so I just 00:12:58.320 --> 00:13:04.080 want to give you a heads up. Then the victim pulls up OfferUp and is like, oh, yeah, that’s my bike, 00:13:04.080 --> 00:13:07.640 but not only is that my bike, that’s all my other shit. Like, this is the guy. This is 00:13:07.640 --> 00:13:12.880 the guy who robbed me. This is all my stuff, and it’s — you haven’t even had time to make a police 00:13:12.880 --> 00:13:19.240 report. Over time, you start — sometimes you get help, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you win, 00:13:19.240 --> 00:13:22.440 sometimes you lose. Sometimes the victims call the cops, and the cops are like, yeah, let’s go 00:13:22.440 --> 00:13:27.120 get this guy. Boom, it’s — everybody wraps up and wraps for dinner, and it’s a great day, and then… 00:13:27.120 --> 00:13:31.120 What a great feeling that must be to be like — you come home, 00:13:31.120 --> 00:13:35.760 you realize your stuff’s been stolen, and you’re like, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, what do I do? You 00:13:35.760 --> 00:13:39.840 look at your phone and it’s like, hey, I think I found it. It’s like, I didn’t even tell anybody. 00:13:39.840 --> 00:13:42.040 Well, the crazier ones are like — so, 00:13:42.040 --> 00:13:46.860 we’ve had people pop burglars before the victims knew they had been robbed. 00:13:46.860 --> 00:13:48.000 Wow. 00:13:48.000 --> 00:13:53.400 Because — so, the one that — the one I’m thinking about was out of Seattle. 00:13:53.400 --> 00:13:58.840 It was a Colnago, a fairly — it was a pretty high-end bike for sale with this sketch ball, 00:13:58.840 --> 00:14:03.960 and it had been listed on Bike Index but not stolen, not marked stolen. It had just… 00:14:03.960 --> 00:14:04.760 So, just registered. 00:14:04.760 --> 00:14:10.080 …before, and the guy who — the bike-chaser who was kinda chasing this 00:14:10.080 --> 00:14:13.200 thing starts looking into the guy, and it’s getting more interesting and more interesting 00:14:13.200 --> 00:14:16.080 and more interesting. He’s like, man, just call this dude up. So, we call this guy up, 00:14:16.080 --> 00:14:20.920 and he’s in Hawaii. He’s on vacation. He’s like, can you send me that link? So, we send him that 00:14:20.920 --> 00:14:25.480 link. He’s like, that’s all my shit. I’m not even home. I didn’t even — call the cops. So, 00:14:25.480 --> 00:14:29.240 he didn’t even know he had been robbed. These guys had literally done it the night before 00:14:29.240 --> 00:14:32.520 and they were just trying to get rid of the stuff as fast as they could. That’s a great 00:14:32.520 --> 00:14:38.400 feeling. [Music] That’s a slam dunk. I could live off that for a week. It’s such a good — I 00:14:38.400 --> 00:14:43.360 have a day gig and I like my day gig, but it’s not a pretty soul-enriching day gig. But I get 00:14:43.360 --> 00:14:48.680 one or two bikes back and I’m on Cloud 9, ‘cause you’re pulling complete needles out of haystacks. 00:14:48.680 --> 00:14:55.640 After spending a decade spreading the word, bikeindex.org now has its own 00:14:55.640 --> 00:14:59.200 energy and momentum. It’s got the critical mass it deserves to help 00:14:59.200 --> 00:15:02.320 hundreds and even thousands of people recover their stolen bikes. 00:15:02.320 --> 00:15:06.000 That’s every bike mechanic that uses us, and it’s every bike shop that uses us, 00:15:06.000 --> 00:15:11.120 and it’s every big brand — we basically tried to put ourselves in every place 00:15:11.120 --> 00:15:15.640 here a stolen thing could wind up, either getting serviced or trying to get sold or 00:15:15.640 --> 00:15:20.960 trying to get marked for sale or like — we tie into this pawn-search system, 00:15:20.960 --> 00:15:25.120 that if you — if I rob you and take your bike to New York and try to pawn it, 00:15:25.120 --> 00:15:29.920 it’s gonna pop up because we partnered with this pawn-search system. We just took everybody in the 00:15:29.920 --> 00:15:35.280 cycling community and we’re like, here’s this free thing. Please be a node in our network 00:15:35.280 --> 00:15:39.080 to keep an eye out for these things and help recover these — and this happens all the time. 00:15:39.080 --> 00:15:42.600 It’s like, thieves will literally get a flat and roll into a bike shop and be like, 00:15:42.600 --> 00:15:45.360 can you help me with this flat? They’re like, cool, and they just pull up their 00:15:45.360 --> 00:15:50.960 phone and like, doo, doo, doo, Bike Index. It’s stolen. Get out of my shop. We built 00:15:50.960 --> 00:15:55.280 the thing for the community, right? We’re the glue guys. We built the thing that 00:15:55.280 --> 00:16:00.240 every single person in this ecosphere could — if everybody wants to help with this thing, 00:16:00.240 --> 00:16:03.680 you can use this thing. We’re not getting paid. We’re not making money. We just want 00:16:03.680 --> 00:16:09.020 to keep the bikes safe and not let crackheads sell bikes and make thousands of dollars. 00:16:09.020 --> 00:16:12.960 But even though they’d sometimes find stolen bikes, they couldn’t always get it 00:16:12.960 --> 00:16:17.920 back. For instance, calling the cops didn’t work every time. Even if you could prove that that’s 00:16:17.920 --> 00:16:23.120 your bike and here’s the person selling it, it wasn’t enough for the cops to go get your bike 00:16:23.120 --> 00:16:28.140 back for you. So, the victims were telling Bryan, man, what the hell? How do I get my bike back? 00:16:28.140 --> 00:16:32.040 Can’t get anybody to help me, it’s the middle of a pan — we have no choice. 00:16:32.040 --> 00:16:37.160 We just have to let this go. What I tell those people is always like, we didn’t get them this 00:16:37.160 --> 00:16:41.800 time. We’ll get that motherfucker next time. That’s where the patterns start coming in, 00:16:41.800 --> 00:16:48.000 because what happens is the next guy that he robs, we can say — we can tell that victim, 00:16:48.000 --> 00:16:53.560 oh, when you call your cops, tell him also he’s associated with these other — the first 00:16:53.560 --> 00:16:58.480 couple people. It just sort of builds a case on them, but it also lets us sort of surveil 00:17:00.200 --> 00:17:04.200 tactics and methodologies. Like, how soon do you post this stuff after you 00:17:04.200 --> 00:17:07.720 rob somebody? Are you showing stuff in the background that betrays where you’re at? 00:17:07.720 --> 00:17:14.400 Can we dig into who you are and find some information about where you might be? Are you dumb 00:17:14.400 --> 00:17:21.720 enough to take pictures in a location that betrays your actual location? Those have been super fun, 00:17:21.720 --> 00:17:27.000 where they say — they take a picture of this bike for sale in front of their house — this happened 00:17:27.000 --> 00:17:33.280 in Vancouver — and they inadvertently just put the house number in the back of the thing, 00:17:33.280 --> 00:17:37.720 and when they said — so, we get ahold of the victim. The victim calls the cops. The cops call 00:17:37.720 --> 00:17:41.400 a setup and meet, and they meet at a Dairy Queen or — they want to meet a block away. 00:17:41.400 --> 00:17:43.120 Who is meeting? 00:17:43.120 --> 00:17:45.951 The thief — the bad guy that has the bike. 00:17:45.951 --> 00:17:46.340 Is selling it. 00:17:46.340 --> 00:17:50.440 Is selling it, puts it online, doesn’t realize that he’s taken a selfie, 00:17:50.440 --> 00:17:55.360 but he’s showed his house number in the background. We tell the victim 00:17:55.360 --> 00:18:00.160 this guy’s got your stuff. The victim’s like, absolutely, that’s my stuff. But so, they’re 00:18:00.160 --> 00:18:04.200 sort of fake-baiting this guy. He’s like, man, I’m really interested in this bike. It looks great. I 00:18:04.200 --> 00:18:10.720 would love my wife to come — just some bullshit story, right? What will happen is the seller, 00:18:10.720 --> 00:18:17.400 not wanting to have you — he’s like, oh, we’ll go meet near my home, at a Walmart or some shit. 00:18:17.400 --> 00:18:21.200 But instead, what we have the victims do is go forty minutes early and just go right up 00:18:21.200 --> 00:18:24.840 to his front door and knock on the door and just spook him, ‘cause he’s like, 00:18:24.840 --> 00:18:28.760 how the fuck do you know where I live? But they never put — they never realize. 00:18:29.280 --> 00:18:34.120 You catch them off guard. You catch them off their footing. They haven’t had time to sort 00:18:34.120 --> 00:18:39.160 of look around and see, and it just scares the shit out of them. They typically are just like, 00:18:39.160 --> 00:18:44.280 here you go. The vast majority of them are within twenty miles. They don’t really leave 00:18:44.280 --> 00:18:49.160 the same state or city. A lot of them just get — they just get moved a couple zipcodes 00:18:49.160 --> 00:18:51.880 away and they try to sell them online or fence them to their friends, or… 00:18:51.880 --> 00:18:54.180 So, where’s the classic places you see them for sale? 00:18:54.180 --> 00:18:59.120 I mean, OfferUp, without a doubt. Fuck those guys. They’re just a chronic, 00:18:59.120 --> 00:19:00.440 terrible — they’re horrible. 00:19:01.000 --> 00:19:02.400 Why? Why are you saying fuck those guys? 00:19:02.400 --> 00:19:06.880 Fuck those guys? ‘Cause we have tried for a decade to try to get them to care about 00:19:06.880 --> 00:19:10.360 the huge amount of stolen — we have free data, we have open data, we have this whole system. 00:19:10.360 --> 00:19:15.280 We’ve demonstrated to them that your platform is abused left and right. Look at all these bad 00:19:15.280 --> 00:19:20.120 guys. This guy killed somebody in the eighties and he’s selling stuff on your site. If you put 00:19:20.120 --> 00:19:26.360 something in place for bikes, like you do for cars, you assholes — ‘cause you have the Van 00:19:26.360 --> 00:19:31.320 numbers where people can get a Vanfax, and it’s like, some of these bikes are worth 10k now, and 00:19:31.320 --> 00:19:38.840 you’re letting Methlord472 sell — you just have — they have — there’s no — there’s just no vetting. 00:19:39.560 --> 00:19:43.760 It’s just such a rampantly abused place, and it has been for so long, and they just do not care, 00:19:43.760 --> 00:19:47.360 and I know they do not care because we have interfaced with them for years trying to get 00:19:47.360 --> 00:19:51.560 them to care. So, that — OfferUp, Facebook Marketplace, and then there’s a whole sort 00:19:51.560 --> 00:19:56.080 of crappy constellation of knock-offs of OfferUp that are much lesser players, 00:19:56.080 --> 00:19:58.960 but it’s exactly the same idea. It’s just an app where you can be like, 00:19:58.960 --> 00:20:03.320 I’m cleaning out my garage. There are a couple physical markets, but that’s fewer and far 00:20:03.320 --> 00:20:08.880 between. Like, in Oakland, there’s a couple swap meets that are sort of classically known 00:20:08.880 --> 00:20:13.800 as being real super-crazy hotbeds. The vast majority of them pop up pretty close to home. 00:20:13.800 --> 00:20:18.360 He learned there’s a whole supply chain network for the stolen bike market. Like, 00:20:18.360 --> 00:20:22.600 a lot of stolen bikes are not resold by the person who steals them. They’re stolen and 00:20:22.600 --> 00:20:26.140 then they’re taken to a person who can buy it off them real quick, no questions asked. 00:20:26.140 --> 00:20:30.480 We’ve had people literally — they break into an apartment building downtown, 00:20:30.480 --> 00:20:35.480 they literally just ride to the waterfront, and they sell it. It’s been maybe twelve minutes. 00:20:35.480 --> 00:20:39.520 We also have them take it out, stash it, sell it in the next couple days, 00:20:39.520 --> 00:20:44.640 or ride the thing to South Portland — go to that house, ‘cause that guy will give 00:20:44.640 --> 00:20:48.560 you drugs in exchange for the bike, not even converting to money. Just like, here’s drugs. 00:20:48.560 --> 00:20:53.640 Thanks for the bike. That’s the guy that knows — you just gave me a $3,000 bike. I just gave you 00:20:53.640 --> 00:21:00.080 $30 for the drugs. I can sell this for a grand. I still win. So, all those scenarios are true. 00:21:00.080 --> 00:21:04.540 It’s not just druggies selling stolen bikes, though. Some people are just naive. 00:21:04.540 --> 00:21:12.536 Have you ever taken the deep rabbit hole into flipper culture, like r/flipping? 00:21:12.536 --> 00:21:12.545 No. 00:21:12.545 --> 00:21:17.680 [Music] Flipping is basically — you find an item that maybe you can buy in Portland. Let’s 00:21:17.680 --> 00:21:22.400 say they’re these cute little sweaters that have cats on them or something, and there’s one lady 00:21:22.400 --> 00:21:26.200 who makes them in Portland, and they’re really cute and they’re really amazing. You’re like, 00:21:26.200 --> 00:21:30.880 I want to buy ten of those, and I spent $200 on — you put them on Etsy and pretend they’re yours, 00:21:30.880 --> 00:21:37.320 and you make $2,000. There’s all these people that sort of — it’s just like arbitrage as a sport. So, 00:21:37.320 --> 00:21:41.920 they’re like, I found these stupid doll things at Walmart for whatever, and I sold one online 00:21:41.920 --> 00:21:46.320 and I made twenty-eight bucks on it. So, there’s this whole culture around flipping, 00:21:46.320 --> 00:21:50.600 buying a thing, just immediately listing it on some market, ‘cause it’s not on that market or 00:21:50.600 --> 00:21:54.880 whatever, and making some money. Buy low, sell high. That’s it. That’s all flipper culture is. 00:21:54.880 --> 00:22:00.520 But what sucks is they’ve gotten really into bikes. So, we have these sixteen, 00:22:00.520 --> 00:22:09.200 seventeen-year-old kids who don’t understand that some crackhead puts a $3,000 bike on OfferUp, 00:22:09.200 --> 00:22:16.480 and it’s like, need to go ASAP. Hit me up next five hours, and it’s $200. That kid’s like, 00:22:16.480 --> 00:22:19.560 I’m gonna buy that for $200, ‘cause I just researched it and I can sell it for 00:22:19.560 --> 00:22:24.120 $3,000 — and they just don’t — they’re naive enough or dumb enough that they don’t care. 00:22:24.120 --> 00:22:30.080 All they know is, I spent $200 on this thing. I’m pretty damn sure I can sell it for 3k. 00:22:30.080 --> 00:22:33.440 Time and time again, Bryan would spot 00:22:33.440 --> 00:22:37.340 patterns that reveals exactly who the bike thieves are in a certain town. 00:22:37.340 --> 00:22:41.800 What typically ends up happening is you get robbed, you put your bike on my system, 00:22:41.800 --> 00:22:46.400 somebody eventually finds it and says, hey, Jack, I think I found your bike. It’s with this guy. 00:22:46.400 --> 00:22:52.280 I, ten minutes — say, oh yeah, we’ve seen this guy a million times. I can’t call the cops up and say, 00:22:52.280 --> 00:22:57.880 hey, XYZ. The victim has to do it. They’re the ones that have suffered the crime. They’re the 00:22:57.880 --> 00:23:01.400 ones with the police report number. But I can give them all this information that says, look, 00:23:01.400 --> 00:23:07.240 when you call, mention this name. Tell me — we can sort of give them the information that tips 00:23:07.240 --> 00:23:10.880 it from — we’re just gonna take your report to like, oh no, we actually have warrants on 00:23:10.880 --> 00:23:15.680 that guy. Let’s go get him. As we found with the services, we — there’s — I could show you dudes 00:23:15.680 --> 00:23:19.840 right now that we’ve caught with multiple stolens, and they just don’t fucking care. Nobody cares. 00:23:19.840 --> 00:23:23.240 This is so frustrating to be — to have all this evidence, 00:23:23.240 --> 00:23:26.800 to have all this proof that these are the guys and this is exactly where they 00:23:26.800 --> 00:23:29.920 live and all this sort of thing, and then for the cops to be like… 00:23:29.920 --> 00:23:32.080 Here’s all their selfies with all the incriminating stuff 00:23:32.080 --> 00:23:36.640 in the background. Here’s a giant neon sign that says ‘Let’s do crime’. Yeah, 00:23:36.640 --> 00:23:42.280 it’s — they’re not smart. It’s like fish in a barrel, but it’s just really aggravating. 00:23:42.280 --> 00:23:44.440 Why is there a problem here? 00:23:44.440 --> 00:23:50.080 I don’t know. The answer is because there’s no system in place to do anything about it. 00:23:50.080 --> 00:23:51.460 There’s a police system. 00:23:51.460 --> 00:23:52.200 Yeah, but it’s… 00:23:52.200 --> 00:23:53.000 There’s a law system. 00:23:53.000 --> 00:23:56.360 Yeah, there is a police system. There is a law system. They’ll all tell you we’re swamped. 00:23:56.360 --> 00:24:01.000 This lower stuff is not important. But also, if we tip off a cop and say this guy has hundreds of 00:24:01.000 --> 00:24:05.640 thousands of dollars of stolen shit, go get him — and they decide, yeah, hey, this is a guy we 00:24:05.640 --> 00:24:10.040 actually want. He’s in our — we’ve actually been looking for him. Let’s go do a raid. Let’s go see 00:24:10.040 --> 00:24:16.720 everything. He still has his OfferUp account. The police don’t call OfferUp and say, fuck this guy. 00:24:16.720 --> 00:24:21.080 He’s a bad guy. Don’t let him on your — there’s no mechanism there. We gave up. We completely 00:24:21.080 --> 00:24:26.040 just said, fuck it. It’s clear that these people are operating in bad faith. They make money off of 00:24:26.040 --> 00:24:30.200 all the stolen goods. So, we just started routing every single victim to the state attorney general. 00:24:30.200 --> 00:24:33.560 We’re like, file a complaint. We get thousands of people filing complaints, 00:24:33.560 --> 00:24:37.760 eventually maybe this fucking attorney general will get off his ass and actually do something 00:24:37.760 --> 00:24:43.880 about it. But do not engage with OfferUp or Facebook Marketplace or wherever your 00:24:43.880 --> 00:24:49.320 stolen stuff is listed. Do not engage with their systems, because all they will do is nothing, 00:24:49.320 --> 00:24:54.120 or maybe they’ll disable the account for a little while. We found a dude here selling drugs, 00:24:54.120 --> 00:24:58.480 and he had a stolen bike that was taken from a cancer victim, a sixty-five year old cancer 00:24:58.480 --> 00:25:04.440 victim with a blue Tern — that I went and did a repo with some of the local guys here. That guy’s 00:25:04.440 --> 00:25:09.360 account was still active. He was selling drugs on the platform and had the stolen bike, and we 00:25:09.360 --> 00:25:14.160 popped it back from him, and we sent in things saying, this is a bad guy. He had this thing. 00:25:14.160 --> 00:25:17.827 He stole from a fucking cancer victim. His account’s still there. He still sells stuff. There 00:25:17.827 --> 00:25:24.080 is no mechanism in place to take these bad guys off. It’s like, you know, I get it. There’s bigger 00:25:24.080 --> 00:25:29.760 problems in the world, right? This is a pretty — it just sucks when we’re doing them a favor, 00:25:29.760 --> 00:25:34.680 you know? It’s like, you’d think you would want to take the arsonist, rapist, murderer, 00:25:34.680 --> 00:25:40.480 thieving — those super, super bad guys that we are encountering and telling you about, 00:25:40.480 --> 00:25:45.240 you’d think you’d want to do something about that. The answer is, no, we don’t. 00:25:45.240 --> 00:25:48.160 What’s crazy is when somebody reports a stolen bike to the police, 00:25:48.160 --> 00:25:52.920 the police will often say, go register your bike at bikeindex.org. But then, 00:25:52.920 --> 00:25:58.000 when Bike Index tells the police, hey, we found the thief, the police just ignore them. 00:25:58.000 --> 00:26:05.160 So, we have some Canadian partners that are phenomenal, and I — not to stereotype, 00:26:05.160 --> 00:26:09.000 but they’re super nice. They do their job and they’re just really great and they’re really 00:26:09.000 --> 00:26:13.280 engaged, and they’re really nice people. Then we deal with unnamed American cities here that 00:26:13.280 --> 00:26:18.840 just don’t give a fuck. They can’t be bothered. It’s night and day. So, we do have some people, 00:26:18.840 --> 00:26:23.000 and we do have some — we do have some specific officers who are typically 00:26:23.000 --> 00:26:29.800 bike people themselves who are triathletes or they ride competitively or they were downhill guys. So, 00:26:29.800 --> 00:26:34.400 you get these little onesie, twosies, but organizationally, yeah, no, nobody cares. 00:26:34.400 --> 00:26:37.520 So, this is where your service becomes even more important, 00:26:37.520 --> 00:26:40.980 ‘cause it’s like, this is vigilante shit. 00:26:40.980 --> 00:26:45.880 Yeah. I mean, some of it is not. Some of it is super easy. Some of it is just like, hey, 00:26:45.880 --> 00:26:50.440 this idiot kid bought your bike thinking he could make a profit off of it. We feel fine telling you, 00:26:50.440 --> 00:26:53.600 go meet up with this kid and just kinda verbally smack him around a little bit 00:26:53.600 --> 00:26:58.400 and tell him not to be an idiot and get your bike back. But then we also advise people, 00:26:58.400 --> 00:27:03.440 like, no, we looked this guy up; he murdered someone. You should let this bike go. This 00:27:03.440 --> 00:27:07.080 is one that you should just take the L on and take your insurance. But like, you do 00:27:07.080 --> 00:27:11.160 not want to go meet up with this dude and knock on his front door, because he killed somebody. 00:27:11.160 --> 00:27:15.280 The way the site works is victims will put the details of their bike in the database, like 00:27:15.280 --> 00:27:19.480 the color, the description, the serial number, anything you got. Photos of it are even good, too. 00:27:19.480 --> 00:27:23.960 Then they’ll leave the contact details, e-mail and sometimes phone to text, ‘if you see my bike, 00:27:23.960 --> 00:27:28.360 let me know.’ But the system is set up so Bryan can see all the e-mails that get sent through 00:27:28.360 --> 00:27:32.980 the site. So, he can just chime in every now and then and add anything he might know about this. 00:27:32.980 --> 00:27:40.400 So, I’m sitting in my basement in 2020. I’m working, I’m riding out Covid. I’m kinda bored. 00:27:40.400 --> 00:27:50.640 There’s a lot of time to kill in the summer of 2020. This e-mail comes in. [Music] Hello, 00:27:50.640 --> 00:27:54.920 my name is blank. I’m a cyclist from Mexico. I’m truly sorry to inform you that your bike 00:27:54.920 --> 00:27:59.360 is in Mexico. The bike is being sold with a Facebook page, and they link this [inaudible] 00:27:59.360 --> 00:28:03.240 Mark guy. Here you will find your bike with the FOX Transfer seat posted in a recent post. So, I 00:28:03.240 --> 00:28:07.400 hope this information helps you. I sent lots of messages to other reports on this page. 00:28:07.400 --> 00:28:13.040 This mofo sell only stolen bikes, and all are from your area. Hope you can recover. 00:28:13.040 --> 00:28:17.960 The victim had their bike stolen in the Bay Area, which is near San Francisco, 00:28:17.960 --> 00:28:25.720 California. His stolen bike was for sale in Mexico on Facebook. That wasn’t the only 00:28:25.720 --> 00:28:30.040 e-mail. Bryan saw five other e-mails from the same guy messaging different victims, 00:28:30.040 --> 00:28:34.640 letting them all know their bike was now for sale in Mexico. This was strange for 00:28:34.640 --> 00:28:37.660 Bryan. He hasn’t seen these things go across the border like that before. 00:28:37.660 --> 00:28:40.200 You know, we’ve seen them go across the border every now and then, 00:28:40.200 --> 00:28:44.440 but to have five of them, like boom, boom, boom, all from the same place, 00:28:44.440 --> 00:28:51.360 all from the same area — and the minute we looked at this guy, it was just, match, match, match. 00:28:51.360 --> 00:28:56.520 What he means is he looked at the guy’s other listings. He had other bikes for sale, 00:28:56.520 --> 00:29:01.480 too, and as Bryan searched Bike Index, he found hit after hit. It wasn’t just 00:29:01.480 --> 00:29:05.640 five bikes. There were a lot of stolen bikes for sale on this Facebook page, 00:29:05.640 --> 00:29:10.880 and they were all stolen from the Bay Area. So, one of the people who had their bikes stolen 00:29:10.880 --> 00:29:16.160 messaged this Facebook seller in Mexico. Like, hey, jerk, you have my stolen bike. Give it back. 00:29:16.160 --> 00:29:22.240 The seller did this thing on Facebook where you can region-lock your — you can basically say, 00:29:22.240 --> 00:29:26.600 I only want to let people in these countries be able to see my page. So, this guy was like, 00:29:26.600 --> 00:29:30.440 crap, I’ve got these Americans pissed off at me. He region-locked it to Mexico. 00:29:30.440 --> 00:29:34.760 So, for a while, Bryan thought the guy shut the listing down, because they weren’t 00:29:34.760 --> 00:29:39.280 viewable anymore. But then someone got the idea to use a VPN, connect into Mexico, 00:29:39.280 --> 00:29:44.200 and see if they can still see the listings. Yes, the bikes were still listed for sale, and they saw 00:29:44.200 --> 00:29:47.760 there were even more bikes listed at this point, and those were stolen from the Bay Area, too. 00:29:47.760 --> 00:29:50.640 We were just getting our heads around — like, what is this? Like, 00:29:50.640 --> 00:29:55.040 is this guy the — is he actually coming up here and robbing these people? Is he…? Like, 00:29:55.040 --> 00:29:59.360 who is this guy? Why does he have so many? It just kicked off this whole 00:29:59.360 --> 00:30:03.980 series of dominoes that just — the next four years of my life was — that’s what I did. 00:30:03.980 --> 00:30:06.720 I’m gonna pause here for an ad break, but stay with us, 00:30:06.720 --> 00:30:12.920 because this is where Bryan locks in and gets serious. Bryan is tuned into 00:30:12.920 --> 00:30:16.280 this guy on Facebook selling all these stolen bikes. He wants to know more. 00:30:16.280 --> 00:30:19.800 So, we’re looking at this guy, and we’re looking at his web page, and it’s tons and tons 00:30:19.800 --> 00:30:24.040 and tons of bikes, but we can also see tons and tons and tons of prior sales. 00:30:24.040 --> 00:30:26.960 Okay, so, that’s a Facebook Marketplace? 00:30:26.960 --> 00:30:32.400 [Music] No, it’s just a Facebook page. It is not a business page. It’s just like you and I 00:30:32.400 --> 00:30:36.080 would have our own page, but it’s the name of this guy’s business, which is called Constru-Bikes. 00:30:36.080 --> 00:30:41.840 The page had thousands of posts, most of which were bicycles, and so many of them 00:30:41.840 --> 00:30:46.980 were coming back as stolen, all from the Bay Area. This was going to be a lot of data to go through. 00:30:46.980 --> 00:30:50.320 There was me and there were some of the victims, and there were some people in the Bay 00:30:50.320 --> 00:30:56.520 Area that also work in stolen bikes. So, we threw up a Google Doc and we started just tracking like, 00:30:56.520 --> 00:31:01.680 here’s his Facebook post. Here’s his social media. Here’s his Instagram. One of the guys was able to 00:31:01.680 --> 00:31:06.360 sneak into his Instagram by pretending to be somebody else, and we now have access to that. 00:31:06.360 --> 00:31:12.720 It’s just basically getting our heads around like, who is this dude? Where does he operate? 00:31:12.720 --> 00:31:17.760 What’s his name? Where is he advertising? Is it all stolen? Is it all from the same 00:31:17.760 --> 00:31:23.680 place? Just sort of doing some initial — and we had done a real small dossier where we took I 00:31:23.680 --> 00:31:30.960 think his first fifty bikes, and we matched twelve or fifteen of them to the Bay Area. 00:31:30.960 --> 00:31:35.720 We were like, we’re pretty sure the rest of these are also stolen. They’re just not in Bike Index. 00:31:35.720 --> 00:31:40.680 But can we…? We made this zip file in a Google link. We passed it around to a bunch of people 00:31:40.680 --> 00:31:46.160 in the Bay Area who — shop owners and people that run stolen bike Google groups and other 00:31:46.160 --> 00:31:51.040 people who kinda chase bad guys. They were able to pull out more of it. Like, yeah, 00:31:51.040 --> 00:31:54.720 this one was from Oakland. Yeah, shit, this — they were able to get a bunch of matches 00:31:54.720 --> 00:31:58.600 we didn’t know about. So, it just kept getting more and more — like, everything 00:31:58.600 --> 00:32:04.480 this dude has is stolen. It sort of painted this picture of like, this isn’t a one-off. 00:32:04.480 --> 00:32:08.440 This is like, hit, hit, hit, and oh, we didn’t know about that one, 00:32:08.440 --> 00:32:12.840 but later on, it turned out that was a hit, too. It just sort of fleshed out the picture 00:32:12.840 --> 00:32:17.040 for us of like, whoever this fucking dude is, he’s the Keyser Soze of stolen bikes, 00:32:17.040 --> 00:32:23.920 ‘cause everything he has is stolen from one place. But it is like — draw a hundred-mile 00:32:23.920 --> 00:32:29.440 radius around San Francisco. It wasn’t just Oakland. It wasn’t just Marin. It wasn’t just 00:32:29.440 --> 00:32:36.820 San Jose. It was Santa — it was this very big footprint, which we typically — that’s kinda nuts. 00:32:36.820 --> 00:32:38.440 You sold thousands on there. 00:32:38.440 --> 00:32:39.360 I think — yeah, there was like, 00:32:39.360 --> 00:32:44.320 eight-hundred-something a week. The thing is is we — so, we looked from 2020 on. 00:32:44.320 --> 00:32:44.950 Yeah. 00:32:44.950 --> 00:32:50.360 Going back, you could see he’d been operating since 2015. But we basically had to say, 00:32:50.360 --> 00:32:54.360 like, we can’t care about this stuff. We gotta care about the stuff that’s current, that we 00:32:54.360 --> 00:32:58.640 can call victims right now, that we can try to get cops engaged on. We can’t — but we can see 00:32:58.640 --> 00:33:05.660 all this shit. We can see how big of an operation this guy has had for so long, which is alarming. 00:33:05.660 --> 00:33:10.040 As they start to piece this together, they’re seeing that this guy sometimes lists 00:33:10.040 --> 00:33:16.960 a dozen bikes for sale a day in Mexico. They could tie it back to there being a dozen bikes stolen in 00:33:16.960 --> 00:33:22.160 the Bay Area. So, what’s going on here? This guy probably isn’t the one going to San Francisco, 00:33:22.160 --> 00:33:25.200 robbing people there, and then taking the bikes all the way to Mexico to sell it to 00:33:25.200 --> 00:33:31.240 people there. They thought he must be the tail end of some operation, but what operation? Who 00:33:31.240 --> 00:33:35.840 were the people stealing bikes, and where do they go after that, and how do they end up in Mexico? 00:33:35.840 --> 00:33:40.600 Is there some big-ass truck driving across the border every day loaded with stolen bikes? They 00:33:40.600 --> 00:33:44.280 want to be careful in their investigation, too, so they can have a good chance of catching the 00:33:44.280 --> 00:33:48.560 right guys. If they simply call up the Mexican police to say, hey, arrest this guy down here, 00:33:48.560 --> 00:33:53.040 it might not stop the thefts happening in the Bay Area, or those thieves might get away. So, 00:33:53.040 --> 00:33:56.040 the plan was to figure out everyone involved and to build an airtight case 00:33:56.040 --> 00:33:59.560 against them all to hopefully get the police to take them all down at once. 00:33:59.560 --> 00:34:05.200 So, every day I would wake up and I would — we had basically archived as much as we could at 00:34:05.200 --> 00:34:11.600 that point. So, what we were interested in was the new stuff, like, what’s he got that’s new, 00:34:11.600 --> 00:34:16.600 and that was kinda hard to tell because he’s a very — he’s very good at marketing and he’s 00:34:16.600 --> 00:34:21.880 very — he’ll post ten things a day, and sometimes they’re repeats. It’s sort of like, you see a bike 00:34:21.880 --> 00:34:24.960 that you’ve seen for four or five weeks that he’s not getting rid of, but then this brand-new one 00:34:24.960 --> 00:34:28.480 pops up, and you say, okay, well, that’s the one we care about. [Music] That’s the one we 00:34:28.480 --> 00:34:33.880 haven’t already tried to investigate. He would post the bike. We would find it in Bike Index. 00:34:33.880 --> 00:34:38.680 We would call the owner, we’d back-and-forth with them a little bit and say, tell me about 00:34:38.680 --> 00:34:43.240 this. Was this a robbery? Was there footage? Was there cameras? Was it — was anybody assaulted? 00:34:43.240 --> 00:34:47.560 Was this one of those…? Oakland had this series of armed bike-jackings where they 00:34:47.560 --> 00:34:52.240 would literally pull in front of guys on bikes with guns and say, get off the fucking bike, 00:34:52.240 --> 00:34:56.680 and rob them and take the bike and throw it in the car and leave. So, some of these were violent 00:34:56.680 --> 00:35:01.760 crimes. The reason we’re asking is because if a bike gets stolen off the street, nobody cares. 00:35:01.760 --> 00:35:05.320 Somebody sticks a gun in your face and takes a bike, you’re gonna get police assistance. So, 00:35:05.320 --> 00:35:09.280 we were trying to sort of cherry pick. Like, let’s find the ones where there’s surveillance. 00:35:09.280 --> 00:35:13.000 Let’s find the ones where it’s high-dollar. Let’s find the one that there was an assault. 00:35:13.000 --> 00:35:17.560 Let’s find the ones that you can actually pick up the phone and get somebody to care about. So, 00:35:17.560 --> 00:35:23.360 we call the — these calls sucked because I could see it and I wanted to tell them about it, 00:35:23.360 --> 00:35:27.160 but I didn’t want them to deal with the first guy — which was confront this guy 00:35:27.160 --> 00:35:31.560 and blow it up again. So, I would just tell them, look, I’m with Bike Index. I think I’m looking at 00:35:31.560 --> 00:35:34.980 a picture of your stolen bike being sold online, and what I want to know is some more information. 00:35:34.980 --> 00:35:39.920 I’m curious about timing. How long does it take between when 00:35:39.920 --> 00:35:43.320 a bike gets stolen and when it goes up for sale? 00:35:43.320 --> 00:35:49.520 We would see bikes that were stolen within a day or two getting advertised on this shithead’s 00:35:49.520 --> 00:35:56.200 Facebook page, and — but we would see it in a visual setting that looked like America. It 00:35:56.200 --> 00:36:00.400 just — and it’s hard to explain this. Not that there’s apple pie and flags in the background, 00:36:00.400 --> 00:36:04.480 but the ground looks a certain way, the buildings look a certain way, 00:36:04.480 --> 00:36:08.520 and if you look next — kinda like it’s shitty concrete, and it — there’s a feel to it. 00:36:08.520 --> 00:36:10.840 Yeah, absolutely. I watch a lot of the GeoGuessers. 00:36:10.840 --> 00:36:16.160 Yes, yes. We would see a place that just looked like an American setting, 00:36:16.160 --> 00:36:20.040 and we knew that it had only been a day, so we were like, it’s probably still in 00:36:20.040 --> 00:36:24.080 America. But then two weeks later, he’d be advertising the same bike for sale, 00:36:24.080 --> 00:36:30.520 but it would be in a very Mex — it would be in his front lawn, and with — Mexico — very, 00:36:30.520 --> 00:36:35.680 very obviously clear with people’s fucking license plates with the crazy different — so, 00:36:35.680 --> 00:36:40.240 it was like, robbery, already appears for sale, but it’s in America. Two, 00:36:40.240 --> 00:36:46.280 three weeks later, it’s advertised again, but it’s clearly in Mexico. Rinse, cycle, repeat. 00:36:46.280 --> 00:36:50.120 GeoGuessing is really fun. I sometimes find myself playing it for hours. Basically, 00:36:50.120 --> 00:36:53.840 it’s a game where you’re dropped in a random Google Street View somewhere in the world, 00:36:53.840 --> 00:36:59.040 and you need to look around to try to guess where you are in the world. I watch other GeoGuessers, 00:36:59.040 --> 00:37:05.440 and some are insanely good. They seem to know what every mountain and river looks like in the world, 00:37:05.440 --> 00:37:09.120 but they use a lot of well-known clues. Like, how power poles look 00:37:09.120 --> 00:37:13.600 is different from country to country, and the soil color, and the types of plants, 00:37:13.600 --> 00:37:17.880 and the shapes of the street signs, and mile markers look different in every country. These 00:37:17.880 --> 00:37:22.680 all seem to be dead giveaways to determine where that photo was taken in the world. So, 00:37:22.680 --> 00:37:26.880 while it seems strange to think a photo is American or Mexican, it’s actually not. 00:37:26.880 --> 00:37:30.480 There’s a lot of clues that you can use to figure it out. They tried examining 00:37:30.480 --> 00:37:35.200 the metadata of the photos posted to Facebook, too. See, when you take a photo, your camera 00:37:35.200 --> 00:37:40.880 often adds a ton of identifying information in the photo. It’ll list the type of camera, 00:37:40.880 --> 00:37:45.960 the time of day it was taken, and if your camera is GPS-enabled, it might include GPS 00:37:45.960 --> 00:37:50.800 coordinates in the photo’s metadata. But all these photos were posted to Facebook, 00:37:50.800 --> 00:37:56.400 and Facebook learned pretty quickly to scrub all the metadata out of photos to avoid stalking. So, 00:37:56.400 --> 00:38:00.280 there was really nothing to look at there. Now, as Bryan talked with people who were 00:38:00.280 --> 00:38:04.240 getting their bikes stolen in the Bay Area, he was telling them, hey, open a police report, but give 00:38:04.240 --> 00:38:09.120 the police my contact information so I can show them some evidence that I’m seeing on my side. 00:38:09.120 --> 00:38:14.520 I got a very small handful of phone calls, and it was some sergeant somewhere, 00:38:14.520 --> 00:38:18.560 some poor shmuck who had eight hundred other burglary cases, and he’s like, 00:38:18.560 --> 00:38:22.640 your victim says you know where this is? I’m like, yes, it’s in La Barca, 00:38:22.640 --> 00:38:26.760 Jalisco, Mexico. You go, ha, ha, ha! And that would be the end of that phone call. 00:38:27.640 --> 00:38:31.360 They would like — they weren’t dicks. They were cordial about it, but it was like, 00:38:31.360 --> 00:38:37.800 that’s gone, that’s out of my league, that’s like — we’re not Interpol. It’s not a huge surprise. 00:38:37.800 --> 00:38:42.520 Pretty cool service you got there. Thanks for calling. It was that for like, a fucking year. 00:38:42.520 --> 00:38:45.960 But Bryan knew it was just a numbers game. If he kept getting victims 00:38:45.960 --> 00:38:50.320 to report their stolen bikes and attach Bryan’s name and number, at some point, 00:38:50.320 --> 00:38:54.560 some cop who might have had their own bike stolen or something like that would want to 00:38:54.560 --> 00:39:02.185 get this case solved. So, he kept trying to get victims to get cops to call him. 00:39:02.185 --> 00:39:06.360 [Music] Eventually it landed with the right — there’s a guy who’s pretty keen on this, this 00:39:06.360 --> 00:39:12.960 San Francisco police burglary-detective guy, who was like, your name came across my desk that you 00:39:12.960 --> 00:39:17.760 know where all these bikes are going. I have all these burglary cases. Can you tell me about this 00:39:17.760 --> 00:39:24.800 a little bit? That is what kicked off at least a discussion with someone who actually cared, 00:39:24.800 --> 00:39:29.840 who was like, yeah, I have an interest in knowing, ‘cause he was also kinda plugged 00:39:29.840 --> 00:39:35.340 into the bad guys in the Bay Area, and he had an interest in — just tell me what you see. 00:39:35.340 --> 00:39:39.440 So, he told the police everything he knew at the time, and this time, 00:39:39.440 --> 00:39:44.160 they were listening and wanted to stay in touch and continue feeding them information. 00:39:44.160 --> 00:39:48.160 Bryan kept looking for more information about the guy selling bikes in Mexico. 00:39:48.160 --> 00:39:52.440 This guy — I refer to this guy as the OSINT pinata, ‘cause the minute you poke at him, 00:39:52.440 --> 00:39:57.320 literally everything falls out. He’s a cyclist, so his name is all over the place. 00:39:57.880 --> 00:40:05.080 One of the cycling places lists his birthday, so we know his birthday. He is very — I almost 00:40:05.080 --> 00:40:10.480 said vain, but he just posts a lot on social media. He would include a lot 00:40:10.480 --> 00:40:13.920 of interior shots of his place, he would include pictures of his car, his license 00:40:13.920 --> 00:40:18.880 plates. The way he was selling this bike — these bikes on his Facebook page were 00:40:18.880 --> 00:40:22.280 just — he would just put up his banking numbers, ‘cause that’s how he’d get paid. 00:40:22.280 --> 00:40:25.360 So, he’s like, oh, yeah, I’m on HSBC. Here’s my routing number. Here’s my phone number. 00:40:25.360 --> 00:40:30.240 Here’s my WhatsApp. It was like, because he was so good at promotion, he just gave 00:40:30.240 --> 00:40:35.600 us fucking everything. He has a construction business, so he’s — he’s like, into bikes, 00:40:35.600 --> 00:40:39.520 but he’s running this construction business. So, there’s OSINT on the construction business, 00:40:39.520 --> 00:40:42.960 there’s OSINT on the bike thing. He’s putting his phone numbers out there, he’s putting his 00:40:42.960 --> 00:40:50.560 WhatsApps out there, he’s blogging about his sister’s store, and it’s just very open. If you 00:40:50.560 --> 00:40:55.480 look at something long enough and hard enough, especially for years, and you have an interest 00:40:55.480 --> 00:40:59.360 in picking it apart and finding the little details in the background — so, we would see 00:40:59.360 --> 00:41:07.360 things like — he had somebody bring a truckload of stuff to his house once, and it was bikes. 00:41:07.360 --> 00:41:10.040 They were advertising it and they took pictures of all the bikes, but there were 00:41:10.040 --> 00:41:14.400 reflections on the windshield. So, you could see the guy who drove the car. We’re like, 00:41:14.400 --> 00:41:19.680 okay, who’s this fucking guy? He has a lot of women associated with him. He’s got a wife and 00:41:19.680 --> 00:41:23.960 he’s got some sisters and he’s got some other — they’re big families. We’re like, 00:41:23.960 --> 00:41:27.240 who the hell are all these women? We don’t know. We just know first names. 00:41:28.000 --> 00:41:33.560 Then they went to Disneyland and they all bought shirts that said, ‘Mother’, ‘Father’, ‘Uncle’, 00:41:33.560 --> 00:41:38.920 ‘Aunt’, and they stood in this big family picture, and it was like, oh, thank you, you moron. 00:41:38.920 --> 00:41:43.520 You just gave me your family tree. Now we know who these women are, ‘cause they have the same 00:41:43.520 --> 00:41:47.040 last name, but we don’t know if it’s because of marriage or it’s because of familial — and 00:41:47.040 --> 00:41:50.960 then they all got in this big photo together, and it was like, aunt, uncle, brother, mom, 00:41:51.480 --> 00:41:57.440 grandma, and I was like, oh, thank you. So, we did a little work on that. At a certain point we knew, 00:41:57.440 --> 00:42:03.120 okay, the way the system works — stolen in America, stashed somewhere in America, advertised 00:42:03.120 --> 00:42:08.240 in Mexico, somebody sticks them on a truck, then they go to Mexico and he’s advertising them there. 00:42:08.240 --> 00:42:14.280 So, all these pictures we were seeing in the American space, we were scrutinizing. They would 00:42:14.280 --> 00:42:18.920 screw up and they would sort of shoot it at such an angle that you kinda see down the street. So, 00:42:18.920 --> 00:42:23.040 we were like, what kind of trees are we seeing? Is it westward-facing? Is this…? 00:42:23.040 --> 00:42:28.120 They would screw up and they would put pictures of — there was some industrial crap like paint, 00:42:28.120 --> 00:42:34.800 paint thinner, just shit that you would have in a really industrial-type setting. But we were like, 00:42:34.800 --> 00:42:39.140 okay, what is this brand? Is it in Spanish? We’re trying to pick apart every little detail. 00:42:39.140 --> 00:42:44.800 So, after a year of investigating this guy, they knew everything about him. His name 00:42:44.800 --> 00:42:49.640 was Ricardo Estrada Zamora, and they seemed to know a lot about what’s going on in Mexico, 00:42:49.640 --> 00:42:53.960 but still very little about what’s going on in the US. They could see sort of the edges 00:42:53.960 --> 00:42:58.200 and the outline of it, but not the details. They thought thieves must be stealing bikes, 00:42:58.200 --> 00:43:02.280 and then it would end up in some central place in the Bay Area where some photos were taken, 00:43:02.280 --> 00:43:06.600 and the bikes would initially get listed, and then someone would run the truck of bikes down to Ricky 00:43:06.600 --> 00:43:12.120 in Mexico. By this point, there are more victims joining the investigation, an army of helpers, 00:43:12.120 --> 00:43:15.640 practically, people putting trackers on bikes and letting them get stolen to see where they’d end 00:43:15.640 --> 00:43:19.760 up, and people trying to find truckloads of bikes crossing the border, which is actually 00:43:19.760 --> 00:43:24.000 still a mystery to Bryan. How did the bikes get to Mexico, and how often were they driven down there? 00:43:24.000 --> 00:43:28.840 That’s an unknown to me. I know there’s a ton of services that do — so, there’s 00:43:28.840 --> 00:43:35.240 like — once you start digging into this, there’s a billion-and-one little regional shipping — there’s 00:43:35.240 --> 00:43:39.400 one in Sonora, there’s one in Baja, there’s one in — there’s all these weird, little regional 00:43:39.400 --> 00:43:45.720 shippers. I know from having personally driven through the San Diego border. It’s like, you don’t 00:43:45.720 --> 00:43:49.920 even stop. It’s a four-lane highway that you just blow through, and you’re supposed to pull into the 00:43:49.920 --> 00:43:54.560 tax thing, but you don’t have to, ‘cause a lot of Americans go down to Baja to go to Rosarito. 00:43:54.560 --> 00:43:59.920 They go to whatever. I’ve driven that border through Tijuana for work, and it is literally 00:43:59.920 --> 00:44:04.840 just — you’re like, do I have to stop at a check…? Oh shit, I’m in Mexico. You just — boom. In. 00:44:04.840 --> 00:44:10.560 So, you see people taking stuff in there. So, I — that’s an unknown to me, and I hope it actually 00:44:10.560 --> 00:44:16.400 comes out in this legal process, but — ‘cause I do have some questions. But what we surmised 00:44:16.400 --> 00:44:21.680 was every two to three weeks, a truckload, and a truckload’s about fifteen to twenty bikes. So, 00:44:21.680 --> 00:44:27.120 at one point, after watching and watching and waiting and watching and not really getting 00:44:27.120 --> 00:44:35.680 any breaks, we got one stupid break. [Music] He posted a bike, and it was the usual thirty crop of 00:44:35.680 --> 00:44:44.040 pictures. In one of those pictures was — and this took me a while to pick apart. When you put — when 00:44:44.040 --> 00:44:48.920 you organize things on your iPhone and you make folders — and so, I have a folder that’s like, 00:44:48.920 --> 00:44:52.760 Dogs, a folder that’s like, Running, a folder that’s like, Bikes, and you classify the stuff in 00:44:52.760 --> 00:44:57.040 there. If you look at it in that folder, it puts the name of the folder at the top of the phone. 00:44:57.920 --> 00:45:02.120 So, we saw this weird picture that didn’t look like the rest, and it looked like he had 00:45:02.120 --> 00:45:08.280 accidentally taken a screenshot of the phone, not the picture itself, and it had a name, 00:45:08.280 --> 00:45:16.560 a very unique name at the top of that phone, that picture, which meant he had a folder that had that 00:45:16.560 --> 00:45:24.520 very unique name, which meant there’s probably one of his followers that has a name like that. So, 00:45:24.520 --> 00:45:32.320 we looked at his followers. We found a guy with that name. That guy was located in San Jose. 00:45:32.320 --> 00:45:41.520 He ran a — I think he still runs a transmission shop, like a car shop. The first thing I see when 00:45:41.520 --> 00:45:47.840 I open up this car shop’s Facebook page is this San Jose asshole with a bunch of bikes and the 00:45:47.840 --> 00:45:52.360 same visual settings that we had been seeing in all these American ads, wondering where the hell 00:45:52.360 --> 00:46:00.960 it is. We see this — and it wasn’t immediate, but it was, hey, it’s an industrial setting. 00:46:00.960 --> 00:46:07.400 Then we went to Bing Maps, Google Maps, and we’re looking at this metal, shitty corrugated siding. 00:46:07.400 --> 00:46:12.240 I’m like, that looks like the thing. The color is right. The setting is right. The angles are 00:46:12.240 --> 00:46:17.760 right. Then he had a bunch of interior shots of his shop. So, transmissions are these big, 00:46:17.760 --> 00:46:23.160 heavy — they’re the size of golden retrievers and they weight 380 pounds, and they’re these 00:46:23.160 --> 00:46:29.760 big — so, he has these big industrial orange racks that are made for — they’re very distinct-looking. 00:46:29.760 --> 00:46:33.600 They just — they’re not something you and I would have in our house, ‘cause they’re big. They’re 00:46:33.600 --> 00:46:40.520 meant to carry these big, heavy, scary things. They’re painted this bright, fire-engine orange. 00:46:40.520 --> 00:46:47.600 Similarly, we had seen one other photo fuck-up in a crop of one of the bikes that was advertised 00:46:47.600 --> 00:46:52.640 in America. They shot — instead of putting it against a wall and shooting it so it was sort 00:46:52.640 --> 00:46:57.280 of blank and you couldn’t see anything, they put it up against this completely 00:46:57.280 --> 00:47:01.080 weird-looking orange industrial rack that had this metal thing on it that I did not 00:47:01.080 --> 00:47:06.800 realize at the time was a transmission. But once you started looking, it was like, boom, 00:47:06.800 --> 00:47:11.400 boom. Same guy, same visual setting, same corrugated walls, same color scheme. He’s 00:47:11.400 --> 00:47:17.240 got all these bikes. We found pictures of him with the Mexican kingpin guy having lunch in San 00:47:17.240 --> 00:47:24.760 Jose. Here we are riding in Allan Park. It was just domino, domino, domino. That was this guy. 00:47:24.760 --> 00:47:29.520 This was the US contact that was collecting and staging stolen 00:47:29.520 --> 00:47:33.560 bikes before loading them up and sending them to Mexico. Finally the US side of 00:47:33.560 --> 00:47:37.120 the operation was revealing itself. They even had someone go to the site 00:47:37.120 --> 00:47:41.040 at 2:00 a.m. to verify this is the place that all the US photos are coming from. 00:47:41.040 --> 00:47:45.280 This is our guy. This is the guy. This is where they’re going, this is where they’re being 00:47:45.280 --> 00:47:49.520 kept, this is where they’re being packaged, this is where they’re being photographed. We don’t know 00:47:49.520 --> 00:47:56.360 what happens in-between the other two, but this is his guy. Forty minutes later, he had realized 00:47:56.360 --> 00:48:01.840 what he had done and he removed that one single photo from his listing. So, it was just this tiny 00:48:01.840 --> 00:48:07.000 window of time that if I had not eaten my bagel faster that morning and not logged in at that 00:48:07.000 --> 00:48:12.400 exact point and not — if my day had panned out any differently, I probably would have missed it. 00:48:12.400 --> 00:48:16.680 ‘Cause we were in the middle of talking about it. We were excited. We’re on Slack. We’re talking 00:48:16.680 --> 00:48:21.280 like, this is the guy. We go back and we’re like, oh yeah, go here; he has this picture. 00:48:21.280 --> 00:48:24.440 They would go back and reload it, and they reloaded it, and that picture was gone, but I had 00:48:24.440 --> 00:48:31.440 already screenshot it. So, it was this very small, very lucky — complete OSINT win, right? Like, 00:48:31.440 --> 00:48:36.080 complete — just human error. Look at it long enough, somebody’s gonna trip up, and he did. 00:48:36.080 --> 00:48:38.920 Well, this new piece of information was absolutely 00:48:38.920 --> 00:48:41.460 something the California police could work with. 00:48:41.460 --> 00:48:46.400 They executed a search warrant on that guy in San Jose, found everything they were expecting 00:48:46.400 --> 00:48:54.280 to find, and according to the indictment, also 206 grand in a bag. So, they found bikes packaged 00:48:54.280 --> 00:48:58.560 up for sale, they found — I think they listed nine specific bikes or something like that. 00:48:58.560 --> 00:49:06.240 They caught him completely redhanded. It was sort of a slam dunk. We think, yay, go us. Awesome. 00:49:06.240 --> 00:49:12.520 [Music] This is where the story kinda bifurcates, ‘cause now you have this guy in San Jose who’s 00:49:12.520 --> 00:49:18.080 fucked. The case got kicked up to the FBI, I think because of the cross-border nature of 00:49:18.080 --> 00:49:24.160 the crime or maybe because of the money, but it went into federal hands, not local PD hands. So, 00:49:24.160 --> 00:49:26.840 now it becomes a federal case, and you can read the indictments, and they’re 00:49:26.840 --> 00:49:34.160 bananas. But the second sort of winding path is it does not even touch this guy in Mexico. 00:49:34.160 --> 00:49:39.160 He just switches his supply to San Diego. He’s got another one of those guys somewhere else. 00:49:39.160 --> 00:49:44.800 What? How is this operation still going on? Ricky Zamora was still getting stolen bikes, 00:49:44.800 --> 00:49:48.920 but now they’re getting sourced from San Diego. Looking back at all the stolen bikes 00:49:48.920 --> 00:49:52.480 Ricky was selling before, none of them were coming from San Diego before. So, 00:49:52.480 --> 00:49:56.800 whatever is going on here now is a new operation, and US police don’t have 00:49:56.800 --> 00:50:01.640 a way to arrest him in Mexico, and for some reason, they can’t get him kicked off Facebook, 00:50:01.640 --> 00:50:06.660 either. So, the operation still goes on, now with bikes being stolen from San Diego. 00:50:06.660 --> 00:50:11.640 So, we do exactly the same exercise but we do it in San Diego, and we don’t get any traction 00:50:11.640 --> 00:50:18.200 whatsoever. They tightened up at that point. They realized — blank wall, blank setting, no slip-ups, 00:50:18.200 --> 00:50:24.600 no OSINT mess-ups. We try for four months to get police there involved, including sending 00:50:24.600 --> 00:50:30.520 them Excel sheets of like, here’s the $90,000 worth of bikes that we see that he has. Here are 00:50:30.520 --> 00:50:36.600 the police report numbers for your jurisdiction. Here are the victim names. Can you please subpoena 00:50:36.600 --> 00:50:41.800 Facebook? Just do your job. We just never got any traction. It just never happened. Then 00:50:41.800 --> 00:50:47.000 we saw his focus — this is where I absolutely lost my shit. We start seeing bikes from Bend, 00:50:47.000 --> 00:50:51.960 Oregon. We start seeing bikes from Salem, Oregon. I start seeing bikes from Portland. 00:50:51.960 --> 00:50:56.160 Bryan lives in Portland, Oregon, a very bike-friendly city, 00:50:56.160 --> 00:51:01.080 and since Bryan is so involved with the bike scene, he has a lot of cyclist friends, 00:51:01.080 --> 00:51:05.360 and now he’s seeing some of his friends or people his friends know as becoming 00:51:05.360 --> 00:51:10.320 victims in this investigation. Is there a new operation somewhere in Portland, in his backyard? 00:51:10.320 --> 00:51:15.840 I start seeing bikes with stickers of bike shops that I have friends at, 00:51:15.840 --> 00:51:19.960 that I’ve been to, that I’ve bought bikes from. There was a victim that 00:51:19.960 --> 00:51:24.960 lost a titanium Lynskey that — I talked to her a little bit, and it wound up with this 00:51:24.960 --> 00:51:28.160 prick in Mexico. I friended her on Facebook. We have friends in common. 00:51:28.160 --> 00:51:30.720 I have a question about San Francisco, 00:51:30.720 --> 00:51:35.940 still. When these guys got busted there, did that result in fewer bikes getting stolen? 00:51:35.940 --> 00:51:40.000 The way it works is there’s all these burglary crews in the Bay Area, 00:51:40.000 --> 00:51:45.160 and they’re typically younger guys that are run by an older captain. The captain’s got the car. 00:51:45.160 --> 00:51:49.920 He handles the money. He does the recon. They just run around robbing shit. They’re 00:51:49.920 --> 00:51:52.640 not robbing just for bikes. They’re robbing for whatever. So, they’re robbing stores, 00:51:52.640 --> 00:51:54.880 they’re robbing homes, they’re robbing businesses, they’re robbing commercial, 00:51:54.880 --> 00:51:59.200 they’re robbing — they’re just burglars. That’s what they do. They’re not targeting any specific 00:51:59.200 --> 00:52:05.280 thing. But they know — okay, so, we’ve done our robbing. We’re back at our Alibaba’s cave, 00:52:06.400 --> 00:52:09.560 which is some shitty hotel that they’re renting with all our stolen stuff in it. 00:52:09.560 --> 00:52:14.120 If you get jewelry, it goes to this guy. If you get guns, we fence it with this guy. 00:52:14.120 --> 00:52:20.240 If you get electronics, we fence it over here, and if you get bikes, you go to this guy. That’s the 00:52:20.240 --> 00:52:27.400 guy that we found. So, it was multiple different burglary crews whose job is not ‘go get bikes’; 00:52:27.400 --> 00:52:32.440 it’s just go steal whatever the hell you can steal, and we’ll put it on the black market. 00:52:32.440 --> 00:52:37.520 But if they had bikes, this is the guy that they went to. We actually have some fucking hilarious 00:52:37.520 --> 00:52:44.840 surveillance where we actually — one of these guys scales a fence, drops down the other side of the 00:52:44.840 --> 00:52:50.600 fence, and he stands up and he brushes himself off, and he makes the sign of the cross as a good 00:52:50.600 --> 00:52:55.600 luck charm, and then he goes in and he robs the house, all caught on camera. But we would see it’s 00:52:55.600 --> 00:53:02.200 fat guy, short guy, little guy. It’s 101 different dudes, and it’s not the dude that is running this 00:53:02.200 --> 00:53:06.640 transmission shop. So, we — and we had some other means by which we pieced some of this together. 00:53:06.640 --> 00:53:10.640 So, the bike thieves had to just find a different place to sell their bikes to, 00:53:10.640 --> 00:53:13.880 and they can continue their operation. It sounds like they were just a bunch 00:53:13.880 --> 00:53:16.840 of random burglars who all knew that if they had bikes, they could just sell it 00:53:16.840 --> 00:53:21.840 to this guy real quick. Another pipeline of stolen bikes they saw pop up during this time 00:53:21.840 --> 00:53:26.840 was between Colorado and Juarez, Mexico. Apparently there were thieves in Colorado 00:53:26.840 --> 00:53:31.560 who would steal bikes and then ship them to Juarez to sell. But this was a totally different group 00:53:31.560 --> 00:53:35.260 compared to what Bryan was tracking with the San Francisco and San Diego thieves. 00:53:35.260 --> 00:53:42.400 At one point, Ricky Estrada Zamora, kingpin of the La Barca fencing operation, 00:53:42.400 --> 00:53:48.520 is now listing bikes from guys that I see in Juarez that I know are bad guys that are involved 00:53:48.520 --> 00:53:56.720 in this Colorado pipeline, meaning his supply went from Bay Area to San Diego to Oregon all 00:53:56.720 --> 00:54:03.040 the way back to Colorado through these guys in Juarez. So, the way this manifested was — I was 00:54:03.040 --> 00:54:06.480 talking to a guy in Colorado who got robbed, and I’m like, yeah, there’s these five dicks 00:54:06.480 --> 00:54:10.400 down in Juarez that sell a lot of stolen bikes. Like, oh look, he’s got it. Here’s your bike. 00:54:10.400 --> 00:54:14.360 Call your guy, and this is a bad guy, and he’s — I know that he’s a bad guy, 00:54:14.360 --> 00:54:19.600 and it’s this very specific setting that he takes a picture of them in. More OSINT work. 00:54:19.600 --> 00:54:24.040 Here’s his name. We’re trying to get Lar-edo PD to give a shit about him, but — just like, 00:54:24.040 --> 00:54:29.640 go — here’s your information packet. Good luck. I open up Ricky’s page and I’m looking at the 00:54:29.640 --> 00:54:37.600 same photo, ‘cause he’s doing consignment sales. He’s using these guys — so, it’s like he’s — his 00:54:37.600 --> 00:54:46.760 reach is amazing. I really hand it to the guy. He’s got a endless well of supply. So, 00:54:46.760 --> 00:54:53.600 now, as we sit here, October 17 of 2024, the vast majority of what he’s sourcing is 00:54:53.600 --> 00:55:00.506 Colorado. It’s all coming out of Colorado, ‘cause there’s just endless supply there. 00:55:00.506 --> 00:55:06.440 [Music] It’s frustrating that the biggest seller of stolen US bicycles has been operating 00:55:06.440 --> 00:55:14.480 since 2015 without getting into any trouble. The FBI indictment only listed the name of the US guy 00:55:14.480 --> 00:55:19.880 who owned the transmission shop. It didn’t list Ricky Zamora’s name in it at all. It just says 00:55:19.880 --> 00:55:25.360 ‘an unindicted co-conspirator in Mexico’. The Mexican authorities haven’t arrested him. He 00:55:25.360 --> 00:55:31.480 continues to sell stolen bikes on Facebook. After the FBI published their indictment, 00:55:31.480 --> 00:55:35.560 Wired published an article telling the story as well, and shout out to Christopher Solomon, 00:55:35.560 --> 00:55:38.520 the reported for Wired, for doing such a great job on that story. 00:55:38.520 --> 00:55:43.280 Then other outlets — LA Times, NPR, Planet Money, it got a lot of coverage, 00:55:43.280 --> 00:55:49.840 and every step of the way, we thought, surely, at some point now, someone in Facebook will get it 00:55:49.840 --> 00:55:55.360 together and just nuke this guy’s page. Surely after a federal indictment, this will stick a 00:55:55.360 --> 00:56:00.760 fork in this guy. No. Surely after a Wired article. No. Surely after the LA Times. No. 00:56:00.760 --> 00:56:06.840 Surely after Planet Money. No. Maybe fucking Darknet Diaries will do it. My god. But like… 00:56:06.840 --> 00:56:08.900 He still has his Facebook page going? 00:56:08.900 --> 00:56:12.120 Yeah, he’s selling yesterday. He’s still listing bikes. He’s still making a 00:56:12.120 --> 00:56:16.720 profit. No one has touched him. He posted — there’s — I can send you a screenshot of 00:56:16.720 --> 00:56:22.621 it. He posted this big blanket denial that was sort of — are you familiar with the term DARVO? 00:56:22.621 --> 00:56:22.633 Mm-hm. 00:56:22.633 --> 00:56:26.240 It’s the deny, accuse, reverse-victim offender. He basically said, 00:56:26.920 --> 00:56:31.000 this journalist and liar gets $5 every time someone reads the article. He’s made millions 00:56:31.000 --> 00:56:36.240 of dollars. It’s completely fucking unhinged. It makes no sense. But it’s basically like, 00:56:36.240 --> 00:56:39.920 he denies everything. He says it’s bullshit, but he provides no proof, 00:56:39.920 --> 00:56:42.640 and all these people that were showing up in his comments saying, well, what about this 00:56:42.640 --> 00:56:48.840 bike? That one was stolen. He just deletes them. He just white-washes the whole thing. So, it — I 00:56:48.840 --> 00:56:52.960 get it. I can’t buy a cruise missile and take this dude out. I can’t — I’m not Rambo. I’m not 00:56:52.960 --> 00:56:58.080 gonna go down there. He’s gonna do what he’s gonna do. I just — we just wanted him to stop, right? 00:56:58.080 --> 00:57:02.160 We wanted him to not have a platform that actively turns a blind eye to this guy being 00:57:02.160 --> 00:57:07.560 the most colossal fencing dick of all time making millions of dollars, and we know that ‘cause we 00:57:07.560 --> 00:57:14.880 clocked it. We just thought — and we had many conversations. We tried the stupid Facebook 00:57:14.880 --> 00:57:19.400 reporting, which does nothing. Because a lot of the Bike Index people are in the Bay Area, 00:57:19.400 --> 00:57:23.240 they work — they know a lot of Meta people. They ride with them. We had personal contacts, 00:57:23.240 --> 00:57:27.360 personal friends. Our schtick has always been, we can find the cyclists that we can 00:57:27.360 --> 00:57:32.400 talk to in this organization. We’re Sympatico. You, me, you, me, same, 00:57:32.400 --> 00:57:38.640 same. We’re all friends. That’s how we get shit done. Every single person that we talked at either 00:57:38.640 --> 00:57:44.160 officially or unofficially was just like, we are completely incapable of doing anything about this. 00:57:44.160 --> 00:57:47.800 There is no mechanism — or they would say something like, I put it up the chain 00:57:47.800 --> 00:57:52.560 internally. Thanks. It was not only Meta; it was companies that had been picked up by 00:57:52.560 --> 00:57:57.520 Meta that are now part of the Meta fold. I had an engineer — I sort of ranted about this in one of 00:57:57.520 --> 00:58:02.360 my talks — who was basically — I had this long back-and-forth with this guy. Here’s my proof, 00:58:02.360 --> 00:58:05.520 here’s my Excel sheets. Download a zip file. Here’s the fucking indict — like, 00:58:06.720 --> 00:58:13.200 proof, proof, proof. Can you please just kick this guy off your platform? He said, 00:58:13.200 --> 00:58:20.000 no. I said, why? I’m like, what — is the bar really that high? He’s like, yes. I’m like, 00:58:20.000 --> 00:58:25.200 then I don’t understand. Does he have to shoot someone in the face? What’s it gonna take? 00:58:25.200 --> 00:58:28.640 We sort of got — we were cordial. We were sort of talking about the problem, 00:58:28.640 --> 00:58:33.080 and it was like — he’s like, you know, we have all this AI-generated crap, we have these cell 00:58:33.080 --> 00:58:37.360 phone — we have — there’s just so much fraud, there’s just so much badness. We’re really hoping 00:58:37.360 --> 00:58:43.200 to tackle this with artificial intelligence. I was like, fuck you, buddy. We’re giving you actual 00:58:43.200 --> 00:58:48.840 priceless intelligence that is backed by proof, that is backed by indictments, that is backed 00:58:48.840 --> 00:58:53.840 by screenshots, that is backed by — I could put you on a conference call with 150 victims right 00:58:53.840 --> 00:59:00.800 now. I’m giving you actual intelligence. Just do your job. He’s like, well, we’re really hoping to 00:59:00.800 --> 00:59:06.400 tackle this with AI. It’s an insult. It’s just a complete joke. Nobody’s driving that bus. 00:59:06.400 --> 00:59:09.520 Hasn’t Google…? ‘Cause Google has all these bikes on campus and Facebook 00:59:09.520 --> 00:59:13.520 has all these — you could just borrow them and then use them and leave them. 00:59:13.520 --> 00:59:16.953 Haven’t — why don’t these guys just get wiped out every day that they…? 00:59:16.953 --> 00:59:19.320 They do, they do. We’ve actually talked to some of those 00:59:19.320 --> 00:59:24.080 corporate systems. They’re run — I’m not gonna go down this rabbit hole, 00:59:24.080 --> 00:59:29.400 but other companies that have the same thing in — they do. They get half their fleet stolen. 00:59:29.400 --> 00:59:33.780 So, you’d think, hey, you know all those bikes that just got stolen from your campus…? 00:59:33.780 --> 00:59:34.440 Yeah. 00:59:34.440 --> 00:59:37.987 This is the guy on your page that’s reselling them… 00:59:37.987 --> 00:59:38.960 Yeah. You’d think they would care. 00:59:38.960 --> 00:59:40.280 At least… 00:59:40.280 --> 00:59:47.000 I say this a lot; on the list of bad things that we could be sitting here talking 00:59:47.000 --> 00:59:54.040 about Facebook, ranging from psychological manipulation, illegal data, voter manipulation, 00:59:54.040 --> 01:00:05.066 child sexual abuse, drug dealing — bikes is pretty low on that totem pole, right? And I get that. 01:00:05.066 --> 01:00:09.960 [Music] Bike index has recovered over $27 million worth of bicycles, 01:00:09.960 --> 01:00:15.160 which means they recovered around 15,000 stolen bicycles, and it continues to serve 01:00:15.160 --> 01:00:19.920 as a wonderful tool to help people when no one else seems to want to help. Personally, 01:00:19.920 --> 01:00:24.680 I think it’s a great place to practice OSINT skills. I went on OfferUp in my area and saw 01:00:24.680 --> 01:00:28.200 which bikes were for sale, and I tried to go on bikeindex.org to see if any of them 01:00:28.200 --> 01:00:32.840 matched. Serials often aren’t listed in the listing, but as your eyes adjust to the place, 01:00:32.840 --> 01:00:37.520 you start to notice things; listings with sketchy-looking photos, descriptions lacking 01:00:37.520 --> 01:00:43.320 specifics, or if the description says ‘missing battery’ or ‘missing key’, it’s kind of a clue. 01:00:43.320 --> 01:00:48.000 You take the description of the bike and see if you can find a similar bike on Bike Index. I spent 01:00:48.000 --> 01:00:52.080 an hour doing this, and I found a bike that I thought was a match. It was the same color, 01:00:52.080 --> 01:00:56.080 same model, same year, and the seller said they bought it at an auction and don’t know anything 01:00:56.080 --> 01:01:00.440 about the bike. So, I e-mailed the victim, but they wrote back and said, no, that one’s not 01:01:00.440 --> 01:01:05.920 exactly mine. He had some way of indentifying it, I guess. But there is something exciting 01:01:05.920 --> 01:01:10.720 about this process of bike hunting. The reward is you could help someone find their stolen bike, 01:01:10.720 --> 01:01:15.920 which is a great feeling, and all the info is out there. It’s just up to someone to go find it, 01:01:15.920 --> 01:01:19.400 and it helps your community if you stop a bike thief in your area. 01:01:19.400 --> 01:01:22.400 You could take this to another level, too, and start looking at other listings that user 01:01:22.400 --> 01:01:26.040 might have and try to pinpoint exactly where they are or who they are and see if they’re 01:01:26.040 --> 01:01:30.360 selling a ton of stolen stuff. You might find a bunch of other stolen bikes and learn about that 01:01:30.360 --> 01:01:35.720 person’s identity. Facebook-stalking a bike thief is a wild ride. If you want to get into 01:01:35.720 --> 01:01:40.800 OSINT and like a challenge, this is a fertile space. Try to search Facebook Marketplace, 01:01:40.800 --> 01:01:45.560 Craigslist, or OfferUp for bikes for sale, and then cross-reference that with Bike Index, 01:01:45.560 --> 01:01:49.360 and you might help someone recover their own bike. While this story’s about bicycles, 01:01:49.360 --> 01:01:54.200 it could easily be about standup paddleboards or guitars or anything that’s high-value which has a 01:01:54.200 --> 01:01:58.320 serial number. I’m not sure if those sites exist, but if they don’t, someone needs to make one. 01:01:58.320 --> 01:02:02.120 It’s still incredible to have this reputation that you’ve done all this good 01:02:02.120 --> 01:02:08.520 in the world. It is a zero-billion-dollar-a-year industry. It is. It is not putting food on the 01:02:08.520 --> 01:02:13.880 table. Karmically, it feels really good, but it is exhausting and I got super burned out. At the end 01:02:13.880 --> 01:02:19.500 of the day, this guy’s still doing his thing. So, did I really change anything? Yes or no? 01:02:19.500 --> 01:02:23.160 Oh, and if you’re wondering what’s a good bike lock to keep your bike safe these days, 01:02:23.160 --> 01:02:26.080 Bryan says it doesn’t even matter. If a thief wants it, they’ll get it. 01:02:26.080 --> 01:02:31.120 They either use a giant prybar to pop the lock, or down here in Portland, 01:02:31.120 --> 01:02:34.960 you’ll see those blue — there’s tubes that — they’re called staple racks. They’re just 01:02:34.960 --> 01:02:38.960 the racks that go in the ground. They don’t even bother with a bike lock. They cut the 01:02:38.960 --> 01:02:44.760 rack in two, ‘cause the rack steel is only that thin. So, you can basically go to Home 01:02:44.760 --> 01:02:50.880 Depot and get a tool or a saw that just goes brrt, right through the rack. So, 01:02:50.880 --> 01:02:54.400 they don’t bother defeating the lock. They don’t defile it. They just cut — they just go down a 01:02:54.400 --> 01:02:59.220 line of the racks, go, bip, bip, bip, move the tube, pull the bike out, throw it in the truck. 01:02:59.220 --> 01:03:03.880 So, I guess the advice is to really just take your bike with you wherever you go. Some 01:03:03.880 --> 01:03:07.280 apartments have bike rooms where it’s in a parking garage somewhere, and they tell you, 01:03:07.280 --> 01:03:11.280 hey, store your bike in there. But even there that’s not safe, because at 2:00 a.m., 01:03:11.280 --> 01:03:15.560 thieves could break into the bike room and spend hours unloading bikes and cutting locks, 01:03:15.560 --> 01:03:19.320 because sometimes those bike rooms are so far deep in the parking garage or so far 01:03:19.320 --> 01:03:24.280 away that they can make as much noise as they want, and nobody will hear it. So, 01:03:24.280 --> 01:03:29.360 parking your bike inside your home or apartment is the best option. But even there, 01:03:29.360 --> 01:03:44.659 it’s not entirely safe. The current situation sucks, and all I can say is fuck bike thieves. 01:03:44.659 --> 01:03:48.560 Outro: [Outro music] Thanks to Bryan Hance for sharing this story with us. Bikeindex.org 01:03:48.560 --> 01:03:52.320 is a nonprofit and ran by volunteers. So, if you think it’s a good service, 01:03:52.320 --> 01:03:57.120 maybe donate to them to show your appreciation. This episode was created by me, the spoke joker, 01:03:57.120 --> 01:04:01.960 Jack Rhysider. Our editor is the ghost rider, Tristan Ledger, mixing by Proximity Sound, 01:04:01.960 --> 01:04:07.800 intro music by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. What do Linux users and cyclists 01:04:07.800 --> 01:04:25.720 have in common? They both worry about drivers. This is Darknet Diaries.