How an Engineer Exposed an International Bike Theft Ring - By Its Facebook Friends
Security engineer Bryan Hance co-founded the nonprofit Bike Index, back in 2013, reports the Los Angeles Times, "where cyclists can register their bikes and contact information, making it easier to reunite lost or stolen bikes with their owners." It now holds descriptions and serial numbers of about 1.3 million bikes worldwide. "But in spring 2020, Hance was tipped to something new: Scores of high-end bikes that matched the descriptions of bikes reported stolen from locations across the Bay Area were turning up for sale on Facebook Marketplace and Instagram pages attached to someone in Mexico, thousands of miles away..."The Facebook page he first spotted disappeared, replaced by pages that were blocked to U.S. computers; Hance managed to get in anyway, thanks to creative use of a VPN. He started reaching out to the owners whose stolen bikes he suspected he was seeing for sale. "Can you tell me a little bit about how your bike was stolen," he would ask. Often, the methods were sophisticated and selective. Thieves would break into a bicycle room at an apartment complex with a specialized saw and leave minutes later with only the fanciest mountain bikes... Over time, he spoke to more than a dozen [police] officers in jurisdictions across the Bay Area, including Alameda, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Marin, Napa and Sonoma counties... [H]ere was Hance, telling officers that he believed he had located a stolen bike, in Mexico. "That's gone," the officer would inform him. Or, one time, according to Hance: "We're not Interpol." Hance also tried to get Meta to do something. After all, he had identified what could be hundreds of stolen bikes being sold on its platforms, valued, he estimated, at well over $2 million. He said he got nowhere... [Hance] believed he'd figured out the identity of the seller in Jalisco, and was monitoring that person's personal social media accounts. In early 2021, he had spotted something that might break open the case: the name of a person who was sending the Jalisco seller photos of bikes that matched descriptions of those reported stolen by Bay Area cyclists. Hance theorized that person could be a fence who was collecting stolen bikes on this side of the border and sending photos to Jalisco so they could be posted for sale. Hance hunted through the Jalisco seller's Facebook friends until he found the name there: Victor Romero, of San Jose. More sleuthing revealed that a man by the name of Victor Romero ran an auto shop in San Jose, and, judging by his own Facebook photos, was an avid mountain biker. There was something else: Romero's auto shop in San Jose had distinctive orange shelves. One photo of a bike listed for sale on the Jalisco seller's site had similar orange shelves in the backdrop. Hance contacted a San Francisco police detective who had seemed interested in what he was doing. Check out this guy's auto shop, he advised. San Francisco police raided Romero in the spring of 2021. They found more than $200,000 in cash, according to a federal indictment, along with screenshots from his phone they said showed Romero's proceeds from trafficking in stolen bikes. They also found a Kona Process 153 mountain bike valued at about $4,700 that had been reported stolen from an apartment garage in San Francisco, according to the indictment. It had been disassembled and packaged for shipment to Jalisco. In January, a federal grand jury indicted Victoriano Romero on felony conspiracy charges for his alleged role in a scheme to purchase high-end stolen bicycles from thieves across the Bay Area and transport them to Mexico for resale. But bikes continue to be stolen, and "The guy is still operating," Hance told the Los Angeles Times. "We could do the whole thing again."
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