The [US] West Coast’s Fanciest Stolen Bikes Are Getting Trafficked by One Mastermind in Jalisco, Mexico
The [US] West Coast’s Fanciest Stolen Bikes Are Getting Trafficked by One Mastermind in Jalisco, Mexico
“We have people stealing all over the world.” A digital sleuth named Bryan Hance has spent the past four years obsessively uncovering a bicycle-theft pipeline of astonishing scale.
Bike Index tried to get Meta—then Facebook—to remove Constru-Bikes’ Facebook pages. The efforts hit a brick wall. The company directed Bike Index to click a button to report criminal behavior—“which does nothing,” said Hance. “We clicked it dozens of times,” he told me. “It’s like the button at the crosswalk.” He finally reached an engineer (and cyclist) at the company who said they'd relayed Hance’s concerns to a team that deals with such issues. The reply: The team is focused on other issues, and “there wasn’t much that could be done,” Hance relayed to me. “There’s just nobody at the helm, just nobody fucking driving the bus,” Hance said. (In an email, Meta told WIRED that it prohibits the selling or buying of stolen goods on Facebook and Instagram, and encourages people to report such activity—as Hance has done repeatedly—to the company and the police. The Constru-Bikes pages were still online as of press time.)
Well look at that, Facebook makes money from knowingly helping to sell stolen goods.