BikeBiz Bicycle and cycling retail news
A new petition has been created to encourage auction and second hand sales websites to help fight bike crime.
Among the movements aims are to attempt to tackle stolen bikes sales online and to encourage cycle crime to be taken as seriously as car crime. The petition also calls on the likes of eBay and Gumtree to play an active role in cutting the selling of stolen cycles online.
The petition has been set up by Magdalen Jagri – a cyclist who has suffered from bike theft in the past, and on investigating how to tackle the problem found that it was all too easy for thieves to ‘fence’ stolen bikes on auction sites.
Jagri told BikeBiz: “I started this petition in order to change the system of how the UK deals with the stolen bicycles for the better.
“The idea is to simply make them just as important to deal with as motorcycles, scooters or cars. Registering bicycles are an important step and I hope with my petition I can urge people to act on it and to be aware of it.
“I’d like to call on all the bicycle retailers in the UK to offer as a service with every sale of a bike to register for them on the national site, which the police checks regularly for returning the recovered items: www.immobilise.com.”
Working with, rather than against the auction and second-hand sites is a key aim of the petition: “I believe that with the help of eBay and Gumtree the sales of these bikes could be cut down dramatically and re-establish faith in successfully protecting and recovering these lost or stolen properties.
“As I am a cyclist myself I feel that this is a situation which can and must be changed,” Jagri added.
You can find the petition here.
