JACK: I visited the Facebook campus once. It’s in the Bay Area near San Francisco, California. Yeah,
I just showed up unannounced and walked around the place. My friend was with me and he had to pee,
so we looked for a way in, but we couldn’t find any way into the buildings. We were just curious
what it was like inside, though. But while I was walking around the Facebook campus,
I saw a bunch of bicycles painted in the Facebook blue with the Facebook
logo on them. Apparently it’s a thing in Silicon Valley that tech giants like
Google and Facebook have these bikes around their campus for anyone to use,
for when you need to get to a meeting in another building. Just hop on one of the company bikes
and take it where you want. It makes it super convenient to get around their large campuses.
Well, since I was there and I saw these bikes, I decided to hop on one and go for a ride. They
aren’t locked or have any code or anything. They’re just sitting there for anyone to use.
Dozens of them are all over the campus. So, I hopped on one and I rode it around,
zooming down sidewalks, ripping around corners, and for a brief moment, I felt
like a Facebook employee, whizzing by other people I presumed to be employees. Nobody said anything,
and I left the bike on the other side of the campus. As I spent more time in Silicon Valley,
I saw more and more of these bikes all over the place. People had ridden bikes from the
Google campus over to the HP campus, or you’d see Facebook bikes over at the Cisco offices.
The bikes were scattered all over town, and I presume it’s because people ride them
from office to office, and maybe they’re inside doing some meeting or something,
and they’ll ride back later. But the thing I couldn’t understand was — this being so close
to San Jose and the Bay Area and these bikes just sitting right out front with no chain or
lock — why aren’t these bikes stolen the very moment someone walks away from it? I mean,
I didn’t just ride one; I rode a handful. It became a thing. Every time I saw one around,
I’d hop on it for a little joyride. So, if I could jump on them so easily and ride off
wherever I wanted, what’s stopping anyone from just stealing them all?
(INTRO): [INTRO MUSIC] These are true stories from the dark side of
the internet. I’m Jack Rhysider. This is Darknet Diaries. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS]
JACK: Content warning; since a lot of you appreciate me telling you that there
are swear words, this episode has a lot of swear words in it. So, maybe, I don’t know,
listen with headphones or whatever it is you do when swear words come on the show. You ready?
BRYAN: Mm-hm.
JACK: What kind of — what name should we use for you?
BRYAN: You can call me Bryan. It’s okay. I don’t — I’m not cool enough to have a nom de guerre.
JACK: Bryan, have you ever got your bike stolen?
BRYAN: I have indeed, yes.
JACK: Tell me about it.
BRYAN: [Music] The worst one, the one that I remember with the most pain, was a Cannondale
M300. It was a mountain bike. It was one of the first I’d really spent a decent amount of money
on. This is back when I was at the University of Arizona and I had this crappy little shotgun
apartment where everything was stored in the front. The shower was all the way in the back. I
came home one day, I went and took a shower, and I walk out into the front of my apartment. I’m like,
something is different. Somebody had come in the front door while I was in the shower…
JACK: What?
BRYAN: …and robbed me, and then taken the bike and taken off on the bike.
JACK: While you were showering?
BRYAN: While I was showering.
JACK: How is this possible?
BRYAN: I don’t know, but it was — that’s the one — that was one of many, but that’s the one that
finally broke my brain, and I just — to this day, whenever I see a Cannondale M300 going
down the road and I’m like, son of a bitch. I remember — like, it really sticks with me.
JACK: I can’t believe somebody came in your apartment to do it while you were showering.
BRYAN: But yeah, that one hurt.
JACK: So, did you try looking for that bike?
BRYAN: I did, I did.
JACK: Where’d you look?
BRYAN: I mean, you look around. You physically look around. We kinda knew where the dodgy spots
were, and every single — if you’ve ever had something like that stolen from you, any time
you’re out, if you see one that’s even remotely the shade of — the hairs on the back of your
neck stand up and you’re always thinking, is that it? Is that it? You go scope it out, like — but
there wasn’t much. You watched — back then, it was Craigslist. You watched Craigslist, you could talk
to local bike shops, and you could physically just go run around looking for the damn thing, but…
JACK: What about the police?
BRYAN: That wasn’t really a thing, and that was sort of — you know, college towns — there’s campus
police and there’s city police, and I did report it with the campus police, but it was like — and
I asked somebody; I was like, so, what happens if the city picks it up? They’re like, oh no,
you’re on your own. You have to go report to them, too. You could see this sort of — there
were two silos, you know? They’re two systems that didn’t talk to each other. This is stupid.
JACK: Bryan was frustrated that there was little to no help for him, and he knew it
wasn’t just him who had a stolen bike. Lots of people must feel frustrated like this,
too. Like, what do you do, go to every bike and pawn shop in town,
give them the serial number and say, hey, call me if anyone tries to sell you this bike here,
and then call the police and the campus police and put up posters around town?
It’s really hard to spread the word that your bike got stolen, and here’s what it looks like
in case you see it. [Music] Surely there’s gotta be a better solution to this problem.
BRYAN: So, in a way, that bike was kinda the impetus for this whole thing. It was like,
that’s my origin story, right? ‘Cause this is like, ‘98, ‘99, 2000-ish,
that era. I was lucky enough to be in computer science. It was right when text messaging was
still a new — it was like you could — all this tech — like, a lot of free databases were out,
a lot of people were getting into web development, PHP was — it was this perfect
storm time of like — some shmuck like me could be like, you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna
create a bike database for stolen bikes, and I’m gonna tackle this thing. For once,
all that technology was actually there, and anybody with half a brain could see in five
years from now that phones are gonna be a way to — and like. You knew, even if you had this crappy
little website at the start. So, I started this site called Stolen Bicycle Registry.
JACK: What was it — what did it do?
BRYAN: It literally just let you put in make, model, color, serial,
add some photos and add a description, and it was the first sort of free open
database of stolen bikes at that point. I only cared about stolen. I never cared about what
happened to them before they were stolen. It was purely, everything in this database is stolen.
JACK: His idea is that if your bike is stolen, let him know, and he’ll try to tell everyone around
town that, hey, before you buy or sell or repair a bicycle, look it up in this database first.
Basically, it’s a place that’s easy to report a stolen bike to, and one that’s easy to search
for stolen bikes, too. So, bike shops and pawn shops started appreciating this site,
to be able to easily check if this bike has been reported stolen. It’s kind of impossible
to ask every police department in the nation if this bike is stolen. But when there’s a nice,
simple site online that will tell you, well, that made it easier to check. But really, is this going
to work? Is anyone actually going to use the site to check if a bike is stolen before buying it?
BRYAN: Somebody was trying to buy a bike off Craigslist,
and they ran the serial number, and it was listed on my site.
JACK: He was able to tell the victim, hey, someone found your bike. It’s for sale right
now on Craigslist. Look. [Music] From there, the victim was able to go get their bike back.
BRYAN: We got a recovered bike.
JACK: It worked. The site got a stolen bike back to the owner. Sure enough,
not long after that happened, another stolen bike was found and recovered.
This was a good idea. The site was working. This gave Bryan fresh energy to work harder
at spreading the word. He was pumped that he helped two people recover their bikes.
BRYAN: It’s pretty — it’s amazing. It was pretty great. I mean,
there’s no money in it, but it’s high karma. It feels really good to just
have built something that people want to use, and it works well.
JACK: He made it so if you found a stolen bike, you could directly contact the person who lost it.
BRYAN: At that point, in that site, you could just basically click a button and be like,
hey dude, I’ve got your bike, and it would shoot an e-mail off to
the owner and then it would put them in touch. I’m not gonna handle every
single one of these. It’s just like, finder meet owner. You guys work it out.
JACK: He kept the site going and was helping more and more people find their bikes. After a while,
it became a lot to keep up with. The site wasn’t
making any money. It was just a labor of love, and he kinda needed some help.
BRYAN: Yeah, so, I only ever cared about stolen, and in 2013 — 2012, 2013,
this bike mechanic in Chicago named Seth Herr ran a Kickstarter that was sort of the opposite. He
was working in bike shops and he was sick of — they’d sell a bunch of bikes, they’d get stolen,
people would come back, they’d have to go through physical paper — it just sucked. It was a really
bad process. He was learning Ruby, and he was sort of coming at it from the other angle,
which is like, let’s just get these things registered the moment — like,
the moment I swipe your credit card and go ‘boop’ on my point-of-sale system, I want that bike
registered. That just solves everybody’s problem. You don’t have to do any work. I don’t have to do
any work. It just goes into this thing. So, here — I was like, oh, that’s a really cool idea.
Then he ran a Kickstarter and raised like, fifty grand. I was like, son — motherfucker,
I’ve been doing this for ten years and no one’s ever donated to me. So,
I reached out to him and we met and we chatted, and we just realized we’re working on the same
thing. You’re doing the first part, which is the annoying ‘let’s get humans to do something
new’ part, but you’re being cool about it by putting it in the point-of-sale systems,
and it just makes people participate. I’m doing all the weird, nitty-gritty, terrible, black-bag,
let’s chase bad guy — [music] and neither one of us really gave a shit about our other — like,
he didn’t want to do stolen stuff, and I didn’t want to do pre-registration stuff. So,
we joined forces, and it was just — from day one after that, it was just, pew, just success,
success, success, and we just iteratively built it into a much better system.
JACK: Together, they created the website bikeindex.org, and with the combined forces,
their reach got a lot wider, which meant more people were using the site and more
stolen bikes were being recovered. As people were learning about this site,
they would go on there and check to see if this bike was stolen before buying it off of someone,
and if there was a hit, they’d tell the bike owner, hey, I think I found your bike.
BRYAN: You know, we spent ten years just begging people, please use this thing. We’re
non-profit. It’s free. We love helping people. You love helping your customers. Victims love
getting their bikes back. Everybody wins. There’s no ‘gotcha’ here, right? You know,
writing blog posts, doing prep, it was just — ‘cause it only works if a ton of people use it.
JACK: Is it specific cities, or…?
BRYAN: It’s all — it’s universal. It’s all over the world. I mean, it’s US and Canada-focused,
but we’ve recovered bikes in Australia and Belgium. There was a real tipping point,
though, where — I want to say it was maybe 2018, 2019 where it no longer became ‘please, please,
please use the service’. It became, for me — we have so much data and so much information coming
our way about — I’m chasing bad guys now. I can tell you — if you come to me and say,
I got my bike stolen in Seattle, beforehand, it was like, please use Bike Index. Now it’s like,
no, these are the four motherfuckers you need to keep an eye on. Watch this — these are the
bad guys in your zipcode, and I know this because we’ve just been looking at these guys for so long.
We just had so much data about where stuff was getting stolen, where it was popping up,
who it was popping up with, which ones were going cross — [music] it just switched from like,
‘please use my service’ to like, I’m actually now able to discern patterns and do sort of — I
really can identify some of the flows. The scenario I always tell people is like — so,
say somebody robs your house on Monday. By Monday night, before you can even make a police report,
probably, depending on what city you’re in, especially during the pandemic,
all that shit is already for sale somewhere, typically online. It’s on OfferUp,
it’s on Facebook Marketplace, it’s on any of these other dodgy sales apps. What happens a
lot is they take your computers, they take your bikes, they take everything.
Somebody is scrolling through OfferUp, and it’s like, Joesleazebag420bongmaster7 has
all this brand-new shit for sale. I think that’s your bike. So, they go to Bike Index,
they send in a message and says, hey, I was just looking at this super-sketchy dude on OfferUp.
He’s got your bike. I think he’s — it looks like he has your bike, ‘cause you had listed this bike
and it looks unique. I was thinking about buying it, but I see that it might be stolen, so I just
want to give you a heads up. Then the victim pulls up OfferUp and is like, oh, yeah, that’s my bike,
but not only is that my bike, that’s all my other shit. Like, this is the guy. This is
the guy who robbed me. This is all my stuff, and it’s — you haven’t even had time to make a police
report. Over time, you start — sometimes you get help, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you win,
sometimes you lose. Sometimes the victims call the cops, and the cops are like, yeah, let’s go
get this guy. Boom, it’s — everybody wraps up and wraps for dinner, and it’s a great day, and then…
JACK: What a great feeling that must be to be like — you come home,
you realize your stuff’s been stolen, and you’re like, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, what do I do? You
look at your phone and it’s like, hey, I think I found it. It’s like, I didn’t even tell anybody.
BRYAN: Well, the crazier ones are like — so,
we’ve had people pop burglars before the victims knew they had been robbed.
JACK: Wow.
BRYAN: Because — so, the one that — the one I’m thinking about was out of Seattle.
It was a Colnago, a fairly — it was a pretty high-end bike for sale with this sketch ball,
and it had been listed on Bike Index but not stolen, not marked stolen. It had just…
JACK: So, just registered.
BRYAN: …before, and the guy who — the bike-chaser who was kinda chasing this
thing starts looking into the guy, and it’s getting more interesting and more interesting
and more interesting. He’s like, man, just call this dude up. So, we call this guy up,
and he’s in Hawaii. He’s on vacation. He’s like, can you send me that link? So, we send him that
link. He’s like, that’s all my shit. I’m not even home. I didn’t even — call the cops. So,
he didn’t even know he had been robbed. These guys had literally done it the night before
and they were just trying to get rid of the stuff as fast as they could. That’s a great
feeling. [Music] That’s a slam dunk. I could live off that for a week. It’s such a good — I
have a day gig and I like my day gig, but it’s not a pretty soul-enriching day gig. But I get
one or two bikes back and I’m on Cloud 9, ‘cause you’re pulling complete needles out of haystacks.
JACK: After spending a decade spreading the word, bikeindex.org now has its own
energy and momentum. It’s got the critical mass it deserves to help
hundreds and even thousands of people recover their stolen bikes.
BRYAN: That’s every bike mechanic that uses us, and it’s every bike shop that uses us,
and it’s every big brand — we basically tried to put ourselves in every place
here a stolen thing could wind up, either getting serviced or trying to get sold or
trying to get marked for sale or like — we tie into this pawn-search system,
that if you — if I rob you and take your bike to New York and try to pawn it,
it’s gonna pop up because we partnered with this pawn-search system. We just took everybody in the
cycling community and we’re like, here’s this free thing. Please be a node in our network
to keep an eye out for these things and help recover these — and this happens all the time.
It’s like, thieves will literally get a flat and roll into a bike shop and be like,
can you help me with this flat? They’re like, cool, and they just pull up their
phone and like, doo, doo, doo, Bike Index. It’s stolen. Get out of my shop. We built
the thing for the community, right? We’re the glue guys. We built the thing that
every single person in this ecosphere could — if everybody wants to help with this thing,
you can use this thing. We’re not getting paid. We’re not making money. We just want
to keep the bikes safe and not let crackheads sell bikes and make thousands of dollars.
JACK: But even though they’d sometimes find stolen bikes, they couldn’t always get it
back. For instance, calling the cops didn’t work every time. Even if you could prove that that’s
your bike and here’s the person selling it, it wasn’t enough for the cops to go get your bike
back for you. So, the victims were telling Bryan, man, what the hell? How do I get my bike back?
BRYAN: Can’t get anybody to help me, it’s the middle of a pan — we have no choice.
We just have to let this go. What I tell those people is always like, we didn’t get them this
time. We’ll get that motherfucker next time. That’s where the patterns start coming in,
because what happens is the next guy that he robs, we can say — we can tell that victim,
oh, when you call your cops, tell him also he’s associated with these other — the first
couple people. It just sort of builds a case on them, but it also lets us sort of surveil
tactics and methodologies. Like, how soon do you post this stuff after you
rob somebody? Are you showing stuff in the background that betrays where you’re at?
Can we dig into who you are and find some information about where you might be? Are you dumb
enough to take pictures in a location that betrays your actual location? Those have been super fun,
where they say — they take a picture of this bike for sale in front of their house — this happened
in Vancouver — and they inadvertently just put the house number in the back of the thing,
and when they said — so, we get ahold of the victim. The victim calls the cops. The cops call
a setup and meet, and they meet at a Dairy Queen or — they want to meet a block away.
JACK: Who is meeting?
BRYAN: The thief — the bad guy that has the bike.
JACK: Is selling it.
BRYAN: Is selling it, puts it online, doesn’t realize that he’s taken a selfie,
but he’s showed his house number in the background. We tell the victim
this guy’s got your stuff. The victim’s like, absolutely, that’s my stuff. But so, they’re
sort of fake-baiting this guy. He’s like, man, I’m really interested in this bike. It looks great. I
would love my wife to come — just some bullshit story, right? What will happen is the seller,
not wanting to have you — he’s like, oh, we’ll go meet near my home, at a Walmart or some shit.
But instead, what we have the victims do is go forty minutes early and just go right up
to his front door and knock on the door and just spook him, ‘cause he’s like,
how the fuck do you know where I live? But they never put — they never realize.
You catch them off guard. You catch them off their footing. They haven’t had time to sort
of look around and see, and it just scares the shit out of them. They typically are just like,
here you go. The vast majority of them are within twenty miles. They don’t really leave
the same state or city. A lot of them just get — they just get moved a couple zipcodes
away and they try to sell them online or fence them to their friends, or…
JACK: So, where’s the classic places you see them for sale?
BRYAN: I mean, OfferUp, without a doubt. Fuck those guys. They’re just a chronic,
terrible — they’re horrible.
JACK: Why? Why are you saying fuck those guys?
BRYAN: Fuck those guys? ‘Cause we have tried for a decade to try to get them to care about
the huge amount of stolen — we have free data, we have open data, we have this whole system.
We’ve demonstrated to them that your platform is abused left and right. Look at all these bad
guys. This guy killed somebody in the eighties and he’s selling stuff on your site. If you put
something in place for bikes, like you do for cars, you assholes — ‘cause you have the Van
numbers where people can get a Vanfax, and it’s like, some of these bikes are worth 10k now, and
you’re letting Methlord472 sell — you just have — they have — there’s no — there’s just no vetting.
It’s just such a rampantly abused place, and it has been for so long, and they just do not care,
and I know they do not care because we have interfaced with them for years trying to get
them to care. So, that — OfferUp, Facebook Marketplace, and then there’s a whole sort
of crappy constellation of knock-offs of OfferUp that are much lesser players,
but it’s exactly the same idea. It’s just an app where you can be like,
I’m cleaning out my garage. There are a couple physical markets, but that’s fewer and far
between. Like, in Oakland, there’s a couple swap meets that are sort of classically known
as being real super-crazy hotbeds. The vast majority of them pop up pretty close to home.
JACK: He learned there’s a whole supply chain network for the stolen bike market. Like,
a lot of stolen bikes are not resold by the person who steals them. They’re stolen and
then they’re taken to a person who can buy it off them real quick, no questions asked.
BRYAN: We’ve had people literally — they break into an apartment building downtown,
they literally just ride to the waterfront, and they sell it. It’s been maybe twelve minutes.
We also have them take it out, stash it, sell it in the next couple days,
or ride the thing to South Portland — go to that house, ‘cause that guy will give
you drugs in exchange for the bike, not even converting to money. Just like, here’s drugs.
Thanks for the bike. That’s the guy that knows — you just gave me a $3,000 bike. I just gave you
$30 for the drugs. I can sell this for a grand. I still win. So, all those scenarios are true.
JACK: It’s not just druggies selling stolen bikes, though. Some people are just naive.
BRYAN: Have you ever taken the deep rabbit hole into flipper culture, like r/flipping?
JACK: No.
BRYAN: [Music] Flipping is basically — you find an item that maybe you can buy in Portland. Let’s
say they’re these cute little sweaters that have cats on them or something, and there’s one lady
who makes them in Portland, and they’re really cute and they’re really amazing. You’re like,
I want to buy ten of those, and I spent $200 on — you put them on Etsy and pretend they’re yours,
and you make $2,000. There’s all these people that sort of — it’s just like arbitrage as a sport. So,
they’re like, I found these stupid doll things at Walmart for whatever, and I sold one online
and I made twenty-eight bucks on it. So, there’s this whole culture around flipping,
buying a thing, just immediately listing it on some market, ‘cause it’s not on that market or
whatever, and making some money. Buy low, sell high. That’s it. That’s all flipper culture is.
But what sucks is they’ve gotten really into bikes. So, we have these sixteen,
seventeen-year-old kids who don’t understand that some crackhead puts a $3,000 bike on OfferUp,
and it’s like, need to go ASAP. Hit me up next five hours, and it’s $200. That kid’s like,
I’m gonna buy that for $200, ‘cause I just researched it and I can sell it for
$3,000 — and they just don’t — they’re naive enough or dumb enough that they don’t care.
All they know is, I spent $200 on this thing. I’m pretty damn sure I can sell it for 3k.
JACK: Time and time again, Bryan would spot
patterns that reveals exactly who the bike thieves are in a certain town.
BRYAN: What typically ends up happening is you get robbed, you put your bike on my system,
somebody eventually finds it and says, hey, Jack, I think I found your bike. It’s with this guy.
I, ten minutes — say, oh yeah, we’ve seen this guy a million times. I can’t call the cops up and say,
hey, XYZ. The victim has to do it. They’re the ones that have suffered the crime. They’re the
ones with the police report number. But I can give them all this information that says, look,
when you call, mention this name. Tell me — we can sort of give them the information that tips
it from — we’re just gonna take your report to like, oh no, we actually have warrants on
that guy. Let’s go get him. As we found with the services, we — there’s — I could show you dudes
right now that we’ve caught with multiple stolens, and they just don’t fucking care. Nobody cares.
JACK: This is so frustrating to be — to have all this evidence,
to have all this proof that these are the guys and this is exactly where they
live and all this sort of thing, and then for the cops to be like…
BRYAN: Here’s all their selfies with all the incriminating stuff
in the background. Here’s a giant neon sign that says ‘Let’s do crime’. Yeah,
it’s — they’re not smart. It’s like fish in a barrel, but it’s just really aggravating.
JACK: Why is there a problem here?
BRYAN: I don’t know. The answer is because there’s no system in place to do anything about it.
JACK: There’s a police system.
BRYAN: Yeah, but it’s…
JACK: There’s a law system.
BRYAN: Yeah, there is a police system. There is a law system. They’ll all tell you we’re swamped.
This lower stuff is not important. But also, if we tip off a cop and say this guy has hundreds of
thousands of dollars of stolen shit, go get him — and they decide, yeah, hey, this is a guy we
actually want. He’s in our — we’ve actually been looking for him. Let’s go do a raid. Let’s go see
everything. He still has his OfferUp account. The police don’t call OfferUp and say, fuck this guy.
He’s a bad guy. Don’t let him on your — there’s no mechanism there. We gave up. We completely
just said, fuck it. It’s clear that these people are operating in bad faith. They make money off of
all the stolen goods. So, we just started routing every single victim to the state attorney general.
We’re like, file a complaint. We get thousands of people filing complaints,
eventually maybe this fucking attorney general will get off his ass and actually do something
about it. But do not engage with OfferUp or Facebook Marketplace or wherever your
stolen stuff is listed. Do not engage with their systems, because all they will do is nothing,
or maybe they’ll disable the account for a little while. We found a dude here selling drugs,
and he had a stolen bike that was taken from a cancer victim, a sixty-five year old cancer
victim with a blue Tern — that I went and did a repo with some of the local guys here. That guy’s
account was still active. He was selling drugs on the platform and had the stolen bike, and we
popped it back from him, and we sent in things saying, this is a bad guy. He had this thing.
He stole from a fucking cancer victim. His account’s still there. He still sells stuff. There
is no mechanism in place to take these bad guys off. It’s like, you know, I get it. There’s bigger
problems in the world, right? This is a pretty — it just sucks when we’re doing them a favor,
you know? It’s like, you’d think you would want to take the arsonist, rapist, murderer,
thieving — those super, super bad guys that we are encountering and telling you about,
you’d think you’d want to do something about that. The answer is, no, we don’t.
JACK: What’s crazy is when somebody reports a stolen bike to the police,
the police will often say, go register your bike at bikeindex.org. But then,
when Bike Index tells the police, hey, we found the thief, the police just ignore them.
BRYAN: So, we have some Canadian partners that are phenomenal, and I — not to stereotype,
but they’re super nice. They do their job and they’re just really great and they’re really
engaged, and they’re really nice people. Then we deal with unnamed American cities here that
just don’t give a fuck. They can’t be bothered. It’s night and day. So, we do have some people,
and we do have some — we do have some specific officers who are typically
bike people themselves who are triathletes or they ride competitively or they were downhill guys. So,
you get these little onesie, twosies, but organizationally, yeah, no, nobody cares.
JACK: So, this is where your service becomes even more important,
‘cause it’s like, this is vigilante shit.
BRYAN: Yeah. I mean, some of it is not. Some of it is super easy. Some of it is just like, hey,
this idiot kid bought your bike thinking he could make a profit off of it. We feel fine telling you,
go meet up with this kid and just kinda verbally smack him around a little bit
and tell him not to be an idiot and get your bike back. But then we also advise people,
like, no, we looked this guy up; he murdered someone. You should let this bike go. This
is one that you should just take the L on and take your insurance. But like, you do
not want to go meet up with this dude and knock on his front door, because he killed somebody.
JACK: The way the site works is victims will put the details of their bike in the database, like
the color, the description, the serial number, anything you got. Photos of it are even good, too.
Then they’ll leave the contact details, e-mail and sometimes phone to text, ‘if you see my bike,
let me know.’ But the system is set up so Bryan can see all the e-mails that get sent through
the site. So, he can just chime in every now and then and add anything he might know about this.
BRYAN: So, I’m sitting in my basement in 2020. I’m working, I’m riding out Covid. I’m kinda bored.
There’s a lot of time to kill in the summer of 2020. This e-mail comes in. [Music] Hello,
my name is blank. I’m a cyclist from Mexico. I’m truly sorry to inform you that your bike
is in Mexico. The bike is being sold with a Facebook page, and they link this [inaudible]
Mark guy. Here you will find your bike with the FOX Transfer seat posted in a recent post. So, I
hope this information helps you. I sent lots of messages to other reports on this page.
This mofo sell only stolen bikes, and all are from your area. Hope you can recover.
JACK: The victim had their bike stolen in the Bay Area, which is near San Francisco,
California. His stolen bike was for sale in Mexico on Facebook. That wasn’t the only
e-mail. Bryan saw five other e-mails from the same guy messaging different victims,
letting them all know their bike was now for sale in Mexico. This was strange for
Bryan. He hasn’t seen these things go across the border like that before.
BRYAN: You know, we’ve seen them go across the border every now and then,
but to have five of them, like boom, boom, boom, all from the same place,
all from the same area — and the minute we looked at this guy, it was just, match, match, match.
JACK: What he means is he looked at the guy’s other listings. He had other bikes for sale,
too, and as Bryan searched Bike Index, he found hit after hit. It wasn’t just
five bikes. There were a lot of stolen bikes for sale on this Facebook page,
and they were all stolen from the Bay Area. So, one of the people who had their bikes stolen
messaged this Facebook seller in Mexico. Like, hey, jerk, you have my stolen bike. Give it back.
BRYAN: The seller did this thing on Facebook where you can region-lock your — you can basically say,
I only want to let people in these countries be able to see my page. So, this guy was like,
crap, I’ve got these Americans pissed off at me. He region-locked it to Mexico.
JACK: So, for a while, Bryan thought the guy shut the listing down, because they weren’t
viewable anymore. But then someone got the idea to use a VPN, connect into Mexico,
and see if they can still see the listings. Yes, the bikes were still listed for sale, and they saw
there were even more bikes listed at this point, and those were stolen from the Bay Area, too.
BRYAN: We were just getting our heads around — like, what is this? Like,
is this guy the — is he actually coming up here and robbing these people? Is he…? Like,
who is this guy? Why does he have so many? It just kicked off this whole
series of dominoes that just — the next four years of my life was — that’s what I did.
JACK: I’m gonna pause here for an ad break, but stay with us,
because this is where Bryan locks in and gets serious. Bryan is tuned into
this guy on Facebook selling all these stolen bikes. He wants to know more.
BRYAN: So, we’re looking at this guy, and we’re looking at his web page, and it’s tons and tons
and tons of bikes, but we can also see tons and tons and tons of prior sales.
JACK: Okay, so, that’s a Facebook Marketplace?
BRYAN: [Music] No, it’s just a Facebook page. It is not a business page. It’s just like you and I
would have our own page, but it’s the name of this guy’s business, which is called Constru-Bikes.
JACK: The page had thousands of posts, most of which were bicycles, and so many of them
were coming back as stolen, all from the Bay Area. This was going to be a lot of data to go through.
BRYAN: There was me and there were some of the victims, and there were some people in the Bay
Area that also work in stolen bikes. So, we threw up a Google Doc and we started just tracking like,
here’s his Facebook post. Here’s his social media. Here’s his Instagram. One of the guys was able to
sneak into his Instagram by pretending to be somebody else, and we now have access to that.
It’s just basically getting our heads around like, who is this dude? Where does he operate?
What’s his name? Where is he advertising? Is it all stolen? Is it all from the same
place? Just sort of doing some initial — and we had done a real small dossier where we took I
think his first fifty bikes, and we matched twelve or fifteen of them to the Bay Area.
We were like, we’re pretty sure the rest of these are also stolen. They’re just not in Bike Index.
But can we…? We made this zip file in a Google link. We passed it around to a bunch of people
in the Bay Area who — shop owners and people that run stolen bike Google groups and other
people who kinda chase bad guys. They were able to pull out more of it. Like, yeah,
this one was from Oakland. Yeah, shit, this — they were able to get a bunch of matches
we didn’t know about. So, it just kept getting more and more — like, everything
this dude has is stolen. It sort of painted this picture of like, this isn’t a one-off.
This is like, hit, hit, hit, and oh, we didn’t know about that one,
but later on, it turned out that was a hit, too. It just sort of fleshed out the picture
for us of like, whoever this fucking dude is, he’s the Keyser Soze of stolen bikes,
‘cause everything he has is stolen from one place. But it is like — draw a hundred-mile
radius around San Francisco. It wasn’t just Oakland. It wasn’t just Marin. It wasn’t just
San Jose. It was Santa — it was this very big footprint, which we typically — that’s kinda nuts.
JACK: You sold thousands on there.
BRYAN: I think — yeah, there was like,
eight-hundred-something a week. The thing is is we — so, we looked from 2020 on.
JACK: Yeah.
BRYAN: Going back, you could see he’d been operating since 2015. But we basically had to say,
like, we can’t care about this stuff. We gotta care about the stuff that’s current, that we
can call victims right now, that we can try to get cops engaged on. We can’t — but we can see
all this shit. We can see how big of an operation this guy has had for so long, which is alarming.
JACK: As they start to piece this together, they’re seeing that this guy sometimes lists
a dozen bikes for sale a day in Mexico. They could tie it back to there being a dozen bikes stolen in
the Bay Area. So, what’s going on here? This guy probably isn’t the one going to San Francisco,
robbing people there, and then taking the bikes all the way to Mexico to sell it to
people there. They thought he must be the tail end of some operation, but what operation? Who
were the people stealing bikes, and where do they go after that, and how do they end up in Mexico?
Is there some big-ass truck driving across the border every day loaded with stolen bikes? They
want to be careful in their investigation, too, so they can have a good chance of catching the
right guys. If they simply call up the Mexican police to say, hey, arrest this guy down here,
it might not stop the thefts happening in the Bay Area, or those thieves might get away. So,
the plan was to figure out everyone involved and to build an airtight case
against them all to hopefully get the police to take them all down at once.
BRYAN: So, every day I would wake up and I would — we had basically archived as much as we could at
that point. So, what we were interested in was the new stuff, like, what’s he got that’s new,
and that was kinda hard to tell because he’s a very — he’s very good at marketing and he’s
very — he’ll post ten things a day, and sometimes they’re repeats. It’s sort of like, you see a bike
that you’ve seen for four or five weeks that he’s not getting rid of, but then this brand-new one
pops up, and you say, okay, well, that’s the one we care about. [Music] That’s the one we
haven’t already tried to investigate. He would post the bike. We would find it in Bike Index.
We would call the owner, we’d back-and-forth with them a little bit and say, tell me about
this. Was this a robbery? Was there footage? Was there cameras? Was it — was anybody assaulted?
Was this one of those…? Oakland had this series of armed bike-jackings where they
would literally pull in front of guys on bikes with guns and say, get off the fucking bike,
and rob them and take the bike and throw it in the car and leave. So, some of these were violent
crimes. The reason we’re asking is because if a bike gets stolen off the street, nobody cares.
Somebody sticks a gun in your face and takes a bike, you’re gonna get police assistance. So,
we were trying to sort of cherry pick. Like, let’s find the ones where there’s surveillance.
Let’s find the ones where it’s high-dollar. Let’s find the one that there was an assault.
Let’s find the ones that you can actually pick up the phone and get somebody to care about. So,
we call the — these calls sucked because I could see it and I wanted to tell them about it,
but I didn’t want them to deal with the first guy — which was confront this guy
and blow it up again. So, I would just tell them, look, I’m with Bike Index. I think I’m looking at
a picture of your stolen bike being sold online, and what I want to know is some more information.
JACK: I’m curious about timing. How long does it take between when
a bike gets stolen and when it goes up for sale?
BRYAN: We would see bikes that were stolen within a day or two getting advertised on this shithead’s
Facebook page, and — but we would see it in a visual setting that looked like America. It
just — and it’s hard to explain this. Not that there’s apple pie and flags in the background,
but the ground looks a certain way, the buildings look a certain way,
and if you look next — kinda like it’s shitty concrete, and it — there’s a feel to it.
JACK: Yeah, absolutely. I watch a lot of the GeoGuessers.
BRYAN: Yes, yes. We would see a place that just looked like an American setting,
and we knew that it had only been a day, so we were like, it’s probably still in
America. But then two weeks later, he’d be advertising the same bike for sale,
but it would be in a very Mex — it would be in his front lawn, and with — Mexico — very,
very obviously clear with people’s fucking license plates with the crazy different — so,
it was like, robbery, already appears for sale, but it’s in America. Two,
three weeks later, it’s advertised again, but it’s clearly in Mexico. Rinse, cycle, repeat.
JACK: GeoGuessing is really fun. I sometimes find myself playing it for hours. Basically,
it’s a game where you’re dropped in a random Google Street View somewhere in the world,
and you need to look around to try to guess where you are in the world. I watch other GeoGuessers,
and some are insanely good. They seem to know what every mountain and river looks like in the world,
but they use a lot of well-known clues. Like, how power poles look
is different from country to country, and the soil color, and the types of plants,
and the shapes of the street signs, and mile markers look different in every country. These
all seem to be dead giveaways to determine where that photo was taken in the world. So,
while it seems strange to think a photo is American or Mexican, it’s actually not.
There’s a lot of clues that you can use to figure it out. They tried examining
the metadata of the photos posted to Facebook, too. See, when you take a photo, your camera
often adds a ton of identifying information in the photo. It’ll list the type of camera,
the time of day it was taken, and if your camera is GPS-enabled, it might include GPS
coordinates in the photo’s metadata. But all these photos were posted to Facebook,
and Facebook learned pretty quickly to scrub all the metadata out of photos to avoid stalking. So,
there was really nothing to look at there. Now, as Bryan talked with people who were
getting their bikes stolen in the Bay Area, he was telling them, hey, open a police report, but give
the police my contact information so I can show them some evidence that I’m seeing on my side.
BRYAN: I got a very small handful of phone calls, and it was some sergeant somewhere,
some poor shmuck who had eight hundred other burglary cases, and he’s like,
your victim says you know where this is? I’m like, yes, it’s in La Barca,
Jalisco, Mexico. You go, ha, ha, ha! And that would be the end of that phone call.
They would like — they weren’t dicks. They were cordial about it, but it was like,
that’s gone, that’s out of my league, that’s like — we’re not Interpol. It’s not a huge surprise.
Pretty cool service you got there. Thanks for calling. It was that for like, a fucking year.
JACK: But Bryan knew it was just a numbers game. If he kept getting victims
to report their stolen bikes and attach Bryan’s name and number, at some point,
some cop who might have had their own bike stolen or something like that would want to
get this case solved. So, he kept trying to get victims to get cops to call him.
BRYAN: [Music] Eventually it landed with the right — there’s a guy who’s pretty keen on this, this
San Francisco police burglary-detective guy, who was like, your name came across my desk that you
know where all these bikes are going. I have all these burglary cases. Can you tell me about this
a little bit? That is what kicked off at least a discussion with someone who actually cared,
who was like, yeah, I have an interest in knowing, ‘cause he was also kinda plugged
into the bad guys in the Bay Area, and he had an interest in — just tell me what you see.
JACK: So, he told the police everything he knew at the time, and this time,
they were listening and wanted to stay in touch and continue feeding them information.
Bryan kept looking for more information about the guy selling bikes in Mexico.
BRYAN: This guy — I refer to this guy as the OSINT pinata, ‘cause the minute you poke at him,
literally everything falls out. He’s a cyclist, so his name is all over the place.
One of the cycling places lists his birthday, so we know his birthday. He is very — I almost
said vain, but he just posts a lot on social media. He would include a lot
of interior shots of his place, he would include pictures of his car, his license
plates. The way he was selling this bike — these bikes on his Facebook page were
just — he would just put up his banking numbers, ‘cause that’s how he’d get paid.
So, he’s like, oh, yeah, I’m on HSBC. Here’s my routing number. Here’s my phone number.
Here’s my WhatsApp. It was like, because he was so good at promotion, he just gave
us fucking everything. He has a construction business, so he’s — he’s like, into bikes,
but he’s running this construction business. So, there’s OSINT on the construction business,
there’s OSINT on the bike thing. He’s putting his phone numbers out there, he’s putting his
WhatsApps out there, he’s blogging about his sister’s store, and it’s just very open. If you
look at something long enough and hard enough, especially for years, and you have an interest
in picking it apart and finding the little details in the background — so, we would see
things like — he had somebody bring a truckload of stuff to his house once, and it was bikes.
They were advertising it and they took pictures of all the bikes, but there were
reflections on the windshield. So, you could see the guy who drove the car. We’re like,
okay, who’s this fucking guy? He has a lot of women associated with him. He’s got a wife and
he’s got some sisters and he’s got some other — they’re big families. We’re like,
who the hell are all these women? We don’t know. We just know first names.
Then they went to Disneyland and they all bought shirts that said, ‘Mother’, ‘Father’, ‘Uncle’,
‘Aunt’, and they stood in this big family picture, and it was like, oh, thank you, you moron.
You just gave me your family tree. Now we know who these women are, ‘cause they have the same
last name, but we don’t know if it’s because of marriage or it’s because of familial — and
then they all got in this big photo together, and it was like, aunt, uncle, brother, mom,
grandma, and I was like, oh, thank you. So, we did a little work on that. At a certain point we knew,
okay, the way the system works — stolen in America, stashed somewhere in America, advertised
in Mexico, somebody sticks them on a truck, then they go to Mexico and he’s advertising them there.
So, all these pictures we were seeing in the American space, we were scrutinizing. They would
screw up and they would sort of shoot it at such an angle that you kinda see down the street. So,
we were like, what kind of trees are we seeing? Is it westward-facing? Is this…?
They would screw up and they would put pictures of — there was some industrial crap like paint,
paint thinner, just shit that you would have in a really industrial-type setting. But we were like,
okay, what is this brand? Is it in Spanish? We’re trying to pick apart every little detail.
JACK: So, after a year of investigating this guy, they knew everything about him. His name
was Ricardo Estrada Zamora, and they seemed to know a lot about what’s going on in Mexico,
but still very little about what’s going on in the US. They could see sort of the edges
and the outline of it, but not the details. They thought thieves must be stealing bikes,
and then it would end up in some central place in the Bay Area where some photos were taken,
and the bikes would initially get listed, and then someone would run the truck of bikes down to Ricky
in Mexico. By this point, there are more victims joining the investigation, an army of helpers,
practically, people putting trackers on bikes and letting them get stolen to see where they’d end
up, and people trying to find truckloads of bikes crossing the border, which is actually
still a mystery to Bryan. How did the bikes get to Mexico, and how often were they driven down there?
BRYAN: That’s an unknown to me. I know there’s a ton of services that do — so, there’s
like — once you start digging into this, there’s a billion-and-one little regional shipping — there’s
one in Sonora, there’s one in Baja, there’s one in — there’s all these weird, little regional
shippers. I know from having personally driven through the San Diego border. It’s like, you don’t
even stop. It’s a four-lane highway that you just blow through, and you’re supposed to pull into the
tax thing, but you don’t have to, ‘cause a lot of Americans go down to Baja to go to Rosarito.
They go to whatever. I’ve driven that border through Tijuana for work, and it is literally
just — you’re like, do I have to stop at a check…? Oh shit, I’m in Mexico. You just — boom. In.
So, you see people taking stuff in there. So, I — that’s an unknown to me, and I hope it actually
comes out in this legal process, but — ‘cause I do have some questions. But what we surmised
was every two to three weeks, a truckload, and a truckload’s about fifteen to twenty bikes. So,
at one point, after watching and watching and waiting and watching and not really getting
any breaks, we got one stupid break. [Music] He posted a bike, and it was the usual thirty crop of
pictures. In one of those pictures was — and this took me a while to pick apart. When you put — when
you organize things on your iPhone and you make folders — and so, I have a folder that’s like,
Dogs, a folder that’s like, Running, a folder that’s like, Bikes, and you classify the stuff in
there. If you look at it in that folder, it puts the name of the folder at the top of the phone.
So, we saw this weird picture that didn’t look like the rest, and it looked like he had
accidentally taken a screenshot of the phone, not the picture itself, and it had a name,
a very unique name at the top of that phone, that picture, which meant he had a folder that had that
very unique name, which meant there’s probably one of his followers that has a name like that. So,
we looked at his followers. We found a guy with that name. That guy was located in San Jose.
He ran a — I think he still runs a transmission shop, like a car shop. The first thing I see when
I open up this car shop’s Facebook page is this San Jose asshole with a bunch of bikes and the
same visual settings that we had been seeing in all these American ads, wondering where the hell
it is. We see this — and it wasn’t immediate, but it was, hey, it’s an industrial setting.
Then we went to Bing Maps, Google Maps, and we’re looking at this metal, shitty corrugated siding.
I’m like, that looks like the thing. The color is right. The setting is right. The angles are
right. Then he had a bunch of interior shots of his shop. So, transmissions are these big,
heavy — they’re the size of golden retrievers and they weight 380 pounds, and they’re these
big — so, he has these big industrial orange racks that are made for — they’re very distinct-looking.
They just — they’re not something you and I would have in our house, ‘cause they’re big. They’re
meant to carry these big, heavy, scary things. They’re painted this bright, fire-engine orange.
Similarly, we had seen one other photo fuck-up in a crop of one of the bikes that was advertised
in America. They shot — instead of putting it against a wall and shooting it so it was sort
of blank and you couldn’t see anything, they put it up against this completely
weird-looking orange industrial rack that had this metal thing on it that I did not
realize at the time was a transmission. But once you started looking, it was like, boom,
boom. Same guy, same visual setting, same corrugated walls, same color scheme. He’s
got all these bikes. We found pictures of him with the Mexican kingpin guy having lunch in San
Jose. Here we are riding in Allan Park. It was just domino, domino, domino. That was this guy.
JACK: This was the US contact that was collecting and staging stolen
bikes before loading them up and sending them to Mexico. Finally the US side of
the operation was revealing itself. They even had someone go to the site
at 2:00 a.m. to verify this is the place that all the US photos are coming from.
BRYAN: This is our guy. This is the guy. This is where they’re going, this is where they’re being
kept, this is where they’re being packaged, this is where they’re being photographed. We don’t know
what happens in-between the other two, but this is his guy. Forty minutes later, he had realized
what he had done and he removed that one single photo from his listing. So, it was just this tiny
window of time that if I had not eaten my bagel faster that morning and not logged in at that
exact point and not — if my day had panned out any differently, I probably would have missed it.
‘Cause we were in the middle of talking about it. We were excited. We’re on Slack. We’re talking
like, this is the guy. We go back and we’re like, oh yeah, go here; he has this picture.
They would go back and reload it, and they reloaded it, and that picture was gone, but I had
already screenshot it. So, it was this very small, very lucky — complete OSINT win, right? Like,
complete — just human error. Look at it long enough, somebody’s gonna trip up, and he did.
JACK: Well, this new piece of information was absolutely
something the California police could work with.
BRYAN: They executed a search warrant on that guy in San Jose, found everything they were expecting
to find, and according to the indictment, also 206 grand in a bag. So, they found bikes packaged
up for sale, they found — I think they listed nine specific bikes or something like that.
They caught him completely redhanded. It was sort of a slam dunk. We think, yay, go us. Awesome.
[Music] This is where the story kinda bifurcates, ‘cause now you have this guy in San Jose who’s
fucked. The case got kicked up to the FBI, I think because of the cross-border nature of
the crime or maybe because of the money, but it went into federal hands, not local PD hands. So,
now it becomes a federal case, and you can read the indictments, and they’re
bananas. But the second sort of winding path is it does not even touch this guy in Mexico.
He just switches his supply to San Diego. He’s got another one of those guys somewhere else.
JACK: What? How is this operation still going on? Ricky Zamora was still getting stolen bikes,
but now they’re getting sourced from San Diego. Looking back at all the stolen bikes
Ricky was selling before, none of them were coming from San Diego before. So,
whatever is going on here now is a new operation, and US police don’t have
a way to arrest him in Mexico, and for some reason, they can’t get him kicked off Facebook,
either. So, the operation still goes on, now with bikes being stolen from San Diego.
BRYAN: So, we do exactly the same exercise but we do it in San Diego, and we don’t get any traction
whatsoever. They tightened up at that point. They realized — blank wall, blank setting, no slip-ups,
no OSINT mess-ups. We try for four months to get police there involved, including sending
them Excel sheets of like, here’s the $90,000 worth of bikes that we see that he has. Here are
the police report numbers for your jurisdiction. Here are the victim names. Can you please subpoena
Facebook? Just do your job. We just never got any traction. It just never happened. Then
we saw his focus — this is where I absolutely lost my shit. We start seeing bikes from Bend,
Oregon. We start seeing bikes from Salem, Oregon. I start seeing bikes from Portland.
JACK: Bryan lives in Portland, Oregon, a very bike-friendly city,
and since Bryan is so involved with the bike scene, he has a lot of cyclist friends,
and now he’s seeing some of his friends or people his friends know as becoming
victims in this investigation. Is there a new operation somewhere in Portland, in his backyard?
BRYAN: I start seeing bikes with stickers of bike shops that I have friends at,
that I’ve been to, that I’ve bought bikes from. There was a victim that
lost a titanium Lynskey that — I talked to her a little bit, and it wound up with this
prick in Mexico. I friended her on Facebook. We have friends in common.
JACK: I have a question about San Francisco,
still. When these guys got busted there, did that result in fewer bikes getting stolen?
BRYAN: The way it works is there’s all these burglary crews in the Bay Area,
and they’re typically younger guys that are run by an older captain. The captain’s got the car.
He handles the money. He does the recon. They just run around robbing shit. They’re
not robbing just for bikes. They’re robbing for whatever. So, they’re robbing stores,
they’re robbing homes, they’re robbing businesses, they’re robbing commercial,
they’re robbing — they’re just burglars. That’s what they do. They’re not targeting any specific
thing. But they know — okay, so, we’ve done our robbing. We’re back at our Alibaba’s cave,
which is some shitty hotel that they’re renting with all our stolen stuff in it.
If you get jewelry, it goes to this guy. If you get guns, we fence it with this guy.
If you get electronics, we fence it over here, and if you get bikes, you go to this guy. That’s the
guy that we found. So, it was multiple different burglary crews whose job is not ‘go get bikes’;
it’s just go steal whatever the hell you can steal, and we’ll put it on the black market.
But if they had bikes, this is the guy that they went to. We actually have some fucking hilarious
surveillance where we actually — one of these guys scales a fence, drops down the other side of the
fence, and he stands up and he brushes himself off, and he makes the sign of the cross as a good
luck charm, and then he goes in and he robs the house, all caught on camera. But we would see it’s
fat guy, short guy, little guy. It’s 101 different dudes, and it’s not the dude that is running this
transmission shop. So, we — and we had some other means by which we pieced some of this together.
JACK: So, the bike thieves had to just find a different place to sell their bikes to,
and they can continue their operation. It sounds like they were just a bunch
of random burglars who all knew that if they had bikes, they could just sell it
to this guy real quick. Another pipeline of stolen bikes they saw pop up during this time
was between Colorado and Juarez, Mexico. Apparently there were thieves in Colorado
who would steal bikes and then ship them to Juarez to sell. But this was a totally different group
compared to what Bryan was tracking with the San Francisco and San Diego thieves.
BRYAN: At one point, Ricky Estrada Zamora, kingpin of the La Barca fencing operation,
is now listing bikes from guys that I see in Juarez that I know are bad guys that are involved
in this Colorado pipeline, meaning his supply went from Bay Area to San Diego to Oregon all
the way back to Colorado through these guys in Juarez. So, the way this manifested was — I was
talking to a guy in Colorado who got robbed, and I’m like, yeah, there’s these five dicks
down in Juarez that sell a lot of stolen bikes. Like, oh look, he’s got it. Here’s your bike.
Call your guy, and this is a bad guy, and he’s — I know that he’s a bad guy,
and it’s this very specific setting that he takes a picture of them in. More OSINT work.
Here’s his name. We’re trying to get Lar-edo PD to give a shit about him, but — just like,
go — here’s your information packet. Good luck. I open up Ricky’s page and I’m looking at the
same photo, ‘cause he’s doing consignment sales. He’s using these guys — so, it’s like he’s — his
reach is amazing. I really hand it to the guy. He’s got a endless well of supply. So,
now, as we sit here, October 17 of 2024, the vast majority of what he’s sourcing is
Colorado. It’s all coming out of Colorado, ‘cause there’s just endless supply there.
JACK: [Music] It’s frustrating that the biggest seller of stolen US bicycles has been operating
since 2015 without getting into any trouble. The FBI indictment only listed the name of the US guy
who owned the transmission shop. It didn’t list Ricky Zamora’s name in it at all. It just says
‘an unindicted co-conspirator in Mexico’. The Mexican authorities haven’t arrested him. He
continues to sell stolen bikes on Facebook. After the FBI published their indictment,
Wired published an article telling the story as well, and shout out to Christopher Solomon,
the reported for Wired, for doing such a great job on that story.
BRYAN: Then other outlets — LA Times, NPR, Planet Money, it got a lot of coverage,
and every step of the way, we thought, surely, at some point now, someone in Facebook will get it
together and just nuke this guy’s page. Surely after a federal indictment, this will stick a
fork in this guy. No. Surely after a Wired article. No. Surely after the LA Times. No.
Surely after Planet Money. No. Maybe fucking Darknet Diaries will do it. My god. But like…
JACK: He still has his Facebook page going?
BRYAN: Yeah, he’s selling yesterday. He’s still listing bikes. He’s still making a
profit. No one has touched him. He posted — there’s — I can send you a screenshot of
it. He posted this big blanket denial that was sort of — are you familiar with the term DARVO?
JACK: Mm-hm.
BRYAN: It’s the deny, accuse, reverse-victim offender. He basically said,
this journalist and liar gets $5 every time someone reads the article. He’s made millions
of dollars. It’s completely fucking unhinged. It makes no sense. But it’s basically like,
he denies everything. He says it’s bullshit, but he provides no proof,
and all these people that were showing up in his comments saying, well, what about this
bike? That one was stolen. He just deletes them. He just white-washes the whole thing. So, it — I
get it. I can’t buy a cruise missile and take this dude out. I can’t — I’m not Rambo. I’m not
gonna go down there. He’s gonna do what he’s gonna do. I just — we just wanted him to stop, right?
We wanted him to not have a platform that actively turns a blind eye to this guy being
the most colossal fencing dick of all time making millions of dollars, and we know that ‘cause we
clocked it. We just thought — and we had many conversations. We tried the stupid Facebook
reporting, which does nothing. Because a lot of the Bike Index people are in the Bay Area,
they work — they know a lot of Meta people. They ride with them. We had personal contacts,
personal friends. Our schtick has always been, we can find the cyclists that we can
talk to in this organization. We’re Sympatico. You, me, you, me, same,
same. We’re all friends. That’s how we get shit done. Every single person that we talked at either
officially or unofficially was just like, we are completely incapable of doing anything about this.
There is no mechanism — or they would say something like, I put it up the chain
internally. Thanks. It was not only Meta; it was companies that had been picked up by
Meta that are now part of the Meta fold. I had an engineer — I sort of ranted about this in one of
my talks — who was basically — I had this long back-and-forth with this guy. Here’s my proof,
here’s my Excel sheets. Download a zip file. Here’s the fucking indict — like,
proof, proof, proof. Can you please just kick this guy off your platform? He said,
no. I said, why? I’m like, what — is the bar really that high? He’s like, yes. I’m like,
then I don’t understand. Does he have to shoot someone in the face? What’s it gonna take?
We sort of got — we were cordial. We were sort of talking about the problem,
and it was like — he’s like, you know, we have all this AI-generated crap, we have these cell
phone — we have — there’s just so much fraud, there’s just so much badness. We’re really hoping
to tackle this with artificial intelligence. I was like, fuck you, buddy. We’re giving you actual
priceless intelligence that is backed by proof, that is backed by indictments, that is backed
by screenshots, that is backed by — I could put you on a conference call with 150 victims right
now. I’m giving you actual intelligence. Just do your job. He’s like, well, we’re really hoping to
tackle this with AI. It’s an insult. It’s just a complete joke. Nobody’s driving that bus.
JACK: Hasn’t Google…? ‘Cause Google has all these bikes on campus and Facebook
has all these — you could just borrow them and then use them and leave them.
Haven’t — why don’t these guys just get wiped out every day that they…?
BRYAN: They do, they do. We’ve actually talked to some of those
corporate systems. They’re run — I’m not gonna go down this rabbit hole,
but other companies that have the same thing in — they do. They get half their fleet stolen.
JACK: So, you’d think, hey, you know all those bikes that just got stolen from your campus…?
BRYAN: Yeah.
JACK: This is the guy on your page that’s reselling them…
BRYAN: Yeah. You’d think they would care.
JACK: At least…
BRYAN: I say this a lot; on the list of bad things that we could be sitting here talking
about Facebook, ranging from psychological manipulation, illegal data, voter manipulation,
child sexual abuse, drug dealing — bikes is pretty low on that totem pole, right? And I get that.
JACK: [Music] Bike index has recovered over $27 million worth of bicycles,
which means they recovered around 15,000 stolen bicycles, and it continues to serve
as a wonderful tool to help people when no one else seems to want to help. Personally,
I think it’s a great place to practice OSINT skills. I went on OfferUp in my area and saw
which bikes were for sale, and I tried to go on bikeindex.org to see if any of them
matched. Serials often aren’t listed in the listing, but as your eyes adjust to the place,
you start to notice things; listings with sketchy-looking photos, descriptions lacking
specifics, or if the description says ‘missing battery’ or ‘missing key’, it’s kind of a clue.
You take the description of the bike and see if you can find a similar bike on Bike Index. I spent
an hour doing this, and I found a bike that I thought was a match. It was the same color,
same model, same year, and the seller said they bought it at an auction and don’t know anything
about the bike. So, I e-mailed the victim, but they wrote back and said, no, that one’s not
exactly mine. He had some way of indentifying it, I guess. But there is something exciting
about this process of bike hunting. The reward is you could help someone find their stolen bike,
which is a great feeling, and all the info is out there. It’s just up to someone to go find it,
and it helps your community if you stop a bike thief in your area.
You could take this to another level, too, and start looking at other listings that user
might have and try to pinpoint exactly where they are or who they are and see if they’re
selling a ton of stolen stuff. You might find a bunch of other stolen bikes and learn about that
person’s identity. Facebook-stalking a bike thief is a wild ride. If you want to get into
OSINT and like a challenge, this is a fertile space. Try to search Facebook Marketplace,
Craigslist, or OfferUp for bikes for sale, and then cross-reference that with Bike Index,
and you might help someone recover their own bike. While this story’s about bicycles,
it could easily be about standup paddleboards or guitars or anything that’s high-value which has a
serial number. I’m not sure if those sites exist, but if they don’t, someone needs to make one.
BRYAN: It’s still incredible to have this reputation that you’ve done all this good
in the world. It is a zero-billion-dollar-a-year industry. It is. It is not putting food on the
table. Karmically, it feels really good, but it is exhausting and I got super burned out. At the end
of the day, this guy’s still doing his thing. So, did I really change anything? Yes or no?
JACK: Oh, and if you’re wondering what’s a good bike lock to keep your bike safe these days,
Bryan says it doesn’t even matter. If a thief wants it, they’ll get it.
BRYAN: They either use a giant prybar to pop the lock, or down here in Portland,
you’ll see those blue — there’s tubes that — they’re called staple racks. They’re just
the racks that go in the ground. They don’t even bother with a bike lock. They cut the
rack in two, ‘cause the rack steel is only that thin. So, you can basically go to Home
Depot and get a tool or a saw that just goes brrt, right through the rack. So,
they don’t bother defeating the lock. They don’t defile it. They just cut — they just go down a
line of the racks, go, bip, bip, bip, move the tube, pull the bike out, throw it in the truck.
JACK: So, I guess the advice is to really just take your bike with you wherever you go. Some
apartments have bike rooms where it’s in a parking garage somewhere, and they tell you,
hey, store your bike in there. But even there that’s not safe, because at 2:00 a.m.,
thieves could break into the bike room and spend hours unloading bikes and cutting locks,
because sometimes those bike rooms are so far deep in the parking garage or so far
away that they can make as much noise as they want, and nobody will hear it. So,
parking your bike inside your home or apartment is the best option. But even there,
it’s not entirely safe. The current situation sucks, and all I can say is fuck bike thieves.
Outro: [Outro music] Thanks to Bryan Hance for sharing this story with us. Bikeindex.org
is a nonprofit and ran by volunteers. So, if you think it’s a good service,
maybe donate to them to show your appreciation. This episode was created by me, the spoke joker,
Jack Rhysider. Our editor is the ghost rider, Tristan Ledger, mixing by Proximity Sound,
intro music by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. What do Linux users and cyclists
have in common? They both worry about drivers. This is Darknet Diaries.