[gpm]

Is there a national bicycle theft ring? I have a vague impression that it's mostly small groups. Steal a few bikes, maybe swap some parts around, sell them as used bikes, repeat.

This takedown seems to have been possible because there was a central group that was moving hundreds of millions of dollars of stolen goods - maybe even billions if you take "cost to manufacture" instead of "resell value". Why would a bike theft ring that centralized exist?

[dendrite9]

I doubt there is one, it seems to me that even with bikes being as expensive as they are the value isn't there. But, maybe? There was an interesting story a year ago about bikes being stolen from CO and popping up for sale in Mexico. The article is long but has a summary at the top of the page. https://bikeindex.org/news/closing-the-loop-a-deep-dive-on-a...

[UberFly]

In Seattle homeless camps had/have bike chop shops.

https://www.kiro7.com/news/bike-rack-chop-shop-growing-trend...