My wife's stolen bike's now on ebay!

lc1981

rillyroy wrote:

Simply if you pay too little (as the buyer did) then you are more than aware that it is stolen. Regardless of any other arguments you have a responsibility to establish that it isn't. The fact that there was no reserve also points to stolen goods.

Believe me there is a solid case for handling here

There may well be, but the no reserve argument isn't really relevant either. There are loads of bikes on eBay without reserves and they're clearly not all stolen. I don't think I've ever set a reserve on anything I've sold on eBay.

Everyone who buys a bike on eBay should ask for proof of ownership, if you ask me - it's not about what price it fetches or whether there's a reserve set.

rillyroy

no reserve but I'll bet you start the bidding at a price you would be willing to sell for.
A new bike that you'd just paid £1000 for?? I'd have started it at £500

lc1981

rillyroy wrote:

no reserve but I'll bet you start the bidding at a price you would be willing to sell for.
A new bike that you'd just paid £1000 for?? I'd have started it at £500

Nope, I start pretty much everything at 99p. I find that a high starting price puts people off bidding. I've seen plenty of bikes go unsold with, say, a £500 starting price, when a similar bike starting at much less will sell for more.

rillyroy

so you would sell a brand new bike that you had just paid £1000 for without a reserve and with a starting price of 99p and risk losing £999.05 on it??

I don't think so

Anyway facts are facts, if original owner can prove it's his he has both the handler and the theif.

Not sure what all your arguments are intended to prove apart from them being fundamentally flawed

rillyroy

sorry £999.01 (bad maths)

lc1981

Yes I would, because I'd be confident that it would sell for far more than the starting price! The market for bikes on eBay is big enough that they tend to fetch good prices. My argument is just to point out that when the price is set by an auction rather than by the seller, the fact that it went cheap isn't necessarily a sign that the bike is stolen. If the seller was selling it at a low fixed price, that would be a different matter.

rillyroy

Well aren't you clever

Bigmitch

When I sold my trek ex9 it had a 99p start drums up more interest and went for 1300

mididoctors

simon44 wrote:

So, in summary, I have informed:

- Police
- ebay
- paypal
- the insurance company

...and noone seems that interested. Meanwhile the bike has sold. It just seems so easy to sell stolen bikes and get away with it!

we had this the other day when with in an hour our friends bike appeared on gumtree. the police couldn't do anything until the following day because the investigation could only be opened after visiting the scene. by which time the bike is likely to be long gone



we then ran a DIY sting operation and recovered the bike ourselves. unfortunately it was one of a pair of bikes stolen and the other has not been seen advertised anywhere. If you stick his mobile into google you get a list of gumtree ads for stuff from blackberrys to bike wheels. the culprit himself was some skinny kid of the estates with a poor education and mastery of english... I am not sure whether he was smart enough to work out whether a posse recovered the bike for the original owner or he had just been mugged. I doubt his behaviour will change except to change up his MO. It's all bit sad really.

since the bikes where stolen off a work site our thinking was two youths took one each to their separate fates