The West Coast’s Fanciest Stolen Bikes Are Getting Trafficked by One Mastermind in Jalisco, Mexico
June 19, 2024 at 09:04PMA citizen sleuth in Portland, Oregon, uncovered hundreds of stolen bicycles online, all sold by the same company. Would law enforcement care? Christopher Solomon tells the wild story:
Before the Facebook page for Constru-Bikes disappeared, Hance had written down an email address listed on it as a contact. He plugged the address into Google. This took him to different web pages, some of which had bikes for sale, too, and contained more breadcrumbs of information. On one page he found a phone number. He plugged the number into Google. This took him to still other websites. The digging also led to cached pages with an advertisement for a raffle, of all things, with bikes as prizes. The ad bore a phone number and, oddly, bank account information where people could send money to enter that raffle. And right there on the raffle’s ad, he came across a name: Ricardo Estrada Zamora. The man’s nickname, the web told him, was Ricky.
Eventually, Hance discovered that the Constru-Bikes Facebook page hadn’t disappeared entirely; whoever was running the page had simply blocked users in the US from seeing it. Hance used a VPN to route his internet traffic through another country and regain access to the page. Now he could see both Constru-Bike’s Facebook page and its Insta account, and that bikes would appear for sale on both accounts, only to be taken off the Facebook page once they sold. Hance and the people helping him could now see the full scale and history of the business—and just how many bikes were coming and going.
Soon, Hance and a volunteer found Zamora’s personal Facebook page. They saw that he lives in La Barca, a city of about 68,000 people in southern Jalisco, more than an hour outside Guadalajara. They also found ample evidence that Zamora and Constru-Bikes were one and the same. The same bicycles often appeared on his personal page. And for a period of time the owner of the Constru-Bikes Instagram page had forgotten to turn off the geotagging feature, so Hance could see that some images were tagged as La Barca. Hance also noticed that certain architectural features appeared in the background of many bike ads and in photos of proud customers standing with their new bikes. One day during my visit with Hance, he surfed over to Google Street View and typed in the address they had found for Zamora: There, within feet of the address, was a golden garage door; bits of an address on a wall; the same vibrant, tropical paint—the same details I could see clearly in the bike ads.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/06/19/the-west-coasts-fanciest-stolen-bikes-are-getting-trafficked-by-one-mastermind-in-jalisco-mexico/
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