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For the love of bikes

Vancouver dealer returns stolen bikes to rightful owners

In the process of buying and selling used bikes in the Lower Mainland, Gord of Bike Rescue sometimes has an “aha!” moment that tips him off to the fact that a bike might be stolen.

Sometimes it’s unique or custom markings on the bike, a rare model, or a combination of parts that sets the bike apart from the herd. And sometimes it’s a little more obvious.

“I was on Hastings Street, eating fish and chips and looking across the street at the bottle depot when I see this guy falling off an amazing road bike and landing on the street,” he said. “I literally dropped my spoon and ran across the street to the guy and arranged to buy the bike. It was a $6,000 road bike and I paid $75.”

While Gord is 100 per cent sure the bike was stolen and has checked the serial numbers on the frame with the police, no one has filed a theft report with the police or posted information about the theft on the usual cycling websites. He’s holding onto the bike a little longer, waiting for the actual owner to turn up. If nobody comes forward, Gord will eventually sell the bike and use the proceeds from the sale to purchase other bikes — some of which may have been stolen — so that he can return them to their rightful owners at no charge.

Gord has a last name but he’s asked that it not be used — he doesn’t want to make himself a target for bike thieves who think he’s a snitch, and he doesn’t want his sources for bikes to dry up. He does share information with police, but with about 200 bikes being stolen every day in Vancouver — making the city the bike theft capital of the world, says Gord — the Vancouver police and RCMP only recover a small percentage of bikes.

In two years Gord and Bike Rescue have reunited more than 154 bikes with their owners, and has another 40 or so bikes pending confirmation. He has returned bikes to owners in Squamish, Whistler, throughout the Lower Mainland, Alberta, Washington, and even to a rider from England.

About 75 per cent of the bikes he buys and sells are legitimate, says Gord, or he can’t prove otherwise. Mistakes have been made — one time he accidentally sold a bike before his mandatory 30-day waiting period was over, only to have the owner identify the bike after being featured on CTV. Another time the police typed an incorrect serial number into their system, and he sold a bike believing it to be clean.

Gord is the first to admit that Bike Rescue isn’t perfect, but he’s getting better at what he does.

“It’s night and day with my buying tactics, how I size up a person, how I size up a bike, and if a bike is reported stolen, my ability to go out and find it,” he said. “The truth is that it’s been accelerating, from about one bike returned a month when I started, to the point where in one month I returned 17 bikes.”

Gord came up with the Bike Rescue idea after being severely injured in a car accident. After being told that he might never walk again, Gord rehabilitated himself to the point where he was able to ride a bike.

“I was on disability, so I wasn’t allowed to earn any money. So I started to do what I used to do with computers, only instead of buying and selling laptops I started to do that with bikes,” he said. “One thing I always did with computers, and continue to do with bikes, is to get the serial numbers checked, and when I was doing that I started to find stolen bikes out there that were being bought and sold and traded.”

That’s when Gord started to be in regular contact with the police, and an officer suggested he run a buy and sell service to earn money. At that point he came across a Santa Cruz V10 at bargain prices, but was unable to find the owner after several months. At last he sold the bike — for what Gord calls “blood money” — and used the proceeds to start Bike Rescue.

Bike Rescue works a few ways. Gord scours the Internet and websites like Pinkbike, Craigslist, NSMB, eBay and others looking for bikes. If a deal seems too good to be true, Gord contacts the owner and asks if the bike is stolen — they usually say no, at which point Gord will buy the bike and run his usual checks. If they admit the bike is stolen — and Gord has had a few sellers say as much — he walks away, because it’s illegal to knowingly purchase a stolen item, and passes the information to the police.

Once he has the bike he gets the word out, checks the numbers, and looks for any postings about stolen bikes that match the description. The owners can have the bike back for free, although many usually give Gord a reward for his trouble, but if nobody comes forward after a month — although it’s usually longer — he fixes up and sells the bike.

The other way Gord works is to take reports of stolen bikes, at which point he starts to make his own inquiries. In his experience he’s found that thieves generally try to resell stolen bikes right away, as it can take the police a month or longer to log the information into their databases.

Gord says people should be aware of the scope of bike thefts in the province, and shouldn’t take any chances — especially when the retail values of a bike is several thousand dollars.

However, there are things that people can do to maximize their chance of recovering a stolen bike.

The main thing is to always record the serial number of the bike, which he says is still the best way to identify stolen bikes. “About 95 per cent of bikes that are returned are because people have documented the serial number and reported the theft,” he said.

Another way is to keep an accurate description of your bike, as well as a recent photograph after adding new parts or components.

You should also do everything you can to make your bike unique.

“Custom paint jobs stick out, and stickers when the thieves don’t peel them off,” he said. “You can also put a unique marking on the bike in an obscure place, like a cross scratch on the bottom bracket. You can even put your name on a piece of paper and drop it down the seatpost tube.”

One pair of bikes was returned to a Whistler Mountain Bike Park patroller because Gord recognized the bikes as being unique to park staff. One of the bikes was broken down for parts, but Gord found the wheels that went with the bike because the owner could identify a broken spoke.

While Bike Rescue has been a success so far, recovering well over $150,000 in stolen bikes, Gord is planning to reassess his business in the fall.

“This isn’t my job, I deliver organic groceries and I like it,” he said.

“At this point I’m seeing whether it can stand on its own two feet, but I’m going to take a hard look at things in the fall and weigh the pros and cons to see if it’s worth continuing.”

Getting some bad press after his service was featured on CTV is one of the reasons, as well as the time and effort it takes. While Gord does make some money off the legitimate bikes he resells, most of the money goes back into buying and retuning the stolen bikes. Most of all, Gord is concerned that he will one day become a target for criminals.

“I walk a pretty fine line between what I report to the police, what I record, but I have to think of my safety first,” he said. “As much as I’d like to see the thieves nailed and in jail and off the streets I’m not going to stick my head in the guillotine for someone’s bike.”

In the meantime, Gord has the problem of storing and maintaining a growing collection of bikes. He’s looking for someone to offer warehouse space for cheap so he can move the bikes out of storage — otherwise he says he will be forced to sell off the majority of bikes he’s held onto for months to make room for new acquisitions.

To report a stolen bike, or see Gord’s new acquisitions, visit www.bikerescue.org.