Pliers in hand, steady pace, a man walks towards a first-price Decathlon bike.
In 13 seconds, it cuts and breaks the inexpensive lock that protected it.
We saw and filmed this action.
This bike was ours.
We wanted him to be robbed.
Our objective ?
Better understand bicycle resale channels.
We are in Stalingrad, in the 19th arrondissement of Paris.
Around the Ourcq Canal, between the Stalingrad, Jaurès and Riquet stations, flights have become daily.
As a result, residents have dubbed the area the “Bermuda Triangle of Stolen Bikes”.
"I had four stolen in a year," says Joaquim, a resident of the neighborhood.
Benjamin, for his part, had his bike stolen in an hour while he was going for a drink around the MK2 cinema: “Thefts discourage people from getting on their bikes a lot, I find that a shame.
It is estimated that one in three cyclists, residing in a city of more than 200,000 inhabitants, has had a bicycle stolen at least once in their life.
But what happens to those many stolen bicycles?
To find out, we picked up a brand new entry-level bike.
We have equipped it with a suitable GPS tracker, hidden in a lamp.
Then we attached it with a first price padlock (2.99 euros), the model of which is used by cyclists on a budget.
It is 11:45 am, all we have to do is wait ...
It took five hours for a potential thief to take an interest in our bike.
4:43 p.m., a forty-something feels the padlock, and makes a phone call, inaudible to our hidden camera.
It also disappears dry.
An hour later, another man, known to residents for his addiction to crack, breaks the lock with a small pliers and evaporates in the neighborhood.
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We go by bike, in the same direction as the thief.
We arrive at the Eole garden, where people addicted to crack transit.
Part of the bicycle theft traffic is concentrated here.
We see a dozen two-wheelers, exposed for everyone to see.
They are stored here before being sold on the sidewalk, in the north of Paris, for the most part.
Open-air “stores”.
But we do not find our precious two-wheeler.
The bike goes through Colombes, then Clichy
The day after the flight, after a technical bug, we finally recovered the GPS data.
The application, supplied with the plotter, tells us that the bike has passed through the Marx-Dormoy district, before leaving for Colombes then Clichy (Hauts-de-Seine).
The Parisian's bike is somewhere in this storage space./LP/Claire Duhamel
The rest of this story is quite incredible.
At 9:00 p.m. the day after the flight, the bike stabilized.
GPS data indicates that he is in a storage room in Clichy.
I go there the next morning.
On the application of the French company Invoxia, which markets the GPS tracker, I also have access to a proximity radar, which connects via Bluetooth to the two-wheeler tracker when it is about twenty meters away.
It remains to find him in the middle of the hundreds of boxes in the warehouse.
I am helped by Jérémy
(Editor's note: the first name has been changed)
, an employee of the furniture storage.
At 11:03 am, the radar spotted the bike.
He is in a truck, which is in front of a half-open box.
We come across an "employee".
Surprised, he calls his boss.
A few minutes later, the manager of this small business appears.
I politely ask him to get my bicycle back: "It has sentimental value to me, please!"
"
The "boss" complies.
“They are excited,” he warns.
He opens the door of the truck.
I widen my eyes.
Inside, there are about fifteen bicycles, wrapped in black plastic.
The boss pulls one out and begins to tear the wrapper.
It's a B'twin Decathlon, dismantled to take up less space in the truck.
We recognize the GPS tracker under the saddle.
The radar panics.
There is no doubt, it is ours.
Our bike was found, dismantled and packaged in black plastic, it was in a truck from an export company to the Maghreb./LP/Claire Duhamel
Next to the truck, inside the box, boxes and luggage indicate destinations in the Maghreb.
The boss confirms that the bikes are sold in Morocco.
He points to mine: "I am reselling that."
"
Traffic in stolen bikes
“I bought it on the Bon Coin,” says the manager.
“I bought ten or fifteen.
It's a lot.
But very quickly, the man gets confused.
He then says he bought everything at Porte de la Chapelle, a place where many stolen bikes are sold.
If he's telling the truth, and according to our GPS data, that means he bought the bike back at the very beginning of his journey, between 6:03 p.m. and 7:43 p.m.
It could not have been resold via Le Bon Coin in such a short period of time.
The boss of the export company, reassured that I am not calling the police, even goes so far as to carry my bike and put it back in the trunk of my car.
His company is registered in the company register, has a Kbis number and exports legally… at least for its official merchandise.
Since 2019, seventeen bicycles have been stolen every day in Paris.
And this figure is probably underestimated, because three quarters of victims do not file a complaint.
“There is an 8% increase in bicycle thefts over the first eight months of 2020,” said Commissioner Olivier Goupil (7th arrondissement of Paris).
We are not aware of the existence of organized channels.
"These are especially" individuals who use resale sites between individuals ".
V, a plainclothes police officer in the north-east of Paris, specifies: “To go up the channels, it would be necessary for the judicial police to take care of it.
And I think right now it's less of their priority than auto theft.
"
More secure parking
It is extremely rare to find a stolen two-wheeler.
This represents 2 to 3% of flights for those who are not equipped with a Bicycode (registration system) according to the FUB, the federation of bicycle users.
In 2021, marking will be mandatory for new and used bikes purchased from an authorized dealer.
Objective: limit fraudulent resales, especially online.
"If your bicycle equipped with a GPS tracker is stolen, you must go to the police," advises Rémi Bader, director of operations for the GPS tracker company Invoxia.
Reports of bicycles tracked by GPS data are still very rare, but allow the police to trace potential channels.
To fight against this type of theft, the police mainly seek the flagrante delicto.
“The problem is that very few bicycles have a marking,” explains V, the plainclothes policeman from northeast Paris.
For example around the Gare de l'Est, there are a lot of bicycles which are hooked up to each other.
They are reported regularly, it is certainly stolen bikes.
But they don't have any markings, so without flagrante delicto, we can't do anything.
"
"We are aware that theft is one of the main obstacles to cycling," concedes David Belliard, deputy mayor of Paris, in charge of mobility.
The town hall calls for "the commitment of the Prefecture of Police" and undertakes to create more parking spaces: "Twenty bicycle boxes in the Parisian public space have already been installed, soon there will be thirty more.
David Belliard also highlights the station bike station of the Gare de Lyon and its 200 secure bicycle spaces "24 hours a day".
Gare Montparnasse, a second with 375 places should open by the end of the year.
At present, bicycle theft is the main factor discouraging the French from adopting two-wheelers.
46% of cyclists say that they sometimes give up using this mode of transport for fear of theft.
