Seattle - Jake Gillum loves his bike. So when it got stolen in Portland, Oregon, while he was on a date, he was determined to get it back.
The quest seemed hopeless, but a week of poring over online postings for his 2009 carbon fibre Fuji paid off when he spotted the road bike offered for sale in Seattle.
What followed was an elaborate sting operation in which Gillum used an alias and an app to give him a disposable cellphone number to trick the thief into meeting him. He confronted the criminal, caught the exchange on camera and gave chase when the thief bolted.
Gillum documented it all on YouTube under the username Simon Jackson.
The video, which was uploaded to YouTube last week, ends when Seattle’s finest arrive. Its highlights include Gillum chasing the bad guy and shouting: “This is why you don’t steal from bicyclists, because we care about our rides! Because I will go 160 miles to get my $2 500 bike back.”
In an interview, the 28-year-old added: “Best feeling in the world, seeing that guy get locked in the police car.”
The success of the sting heartened cyclists around the world as the video spread. Such stings are far from unheard of – there have been at least four in Seattle alone recently, two involving the same suspect – but they don’t typically end up on video that goes viral.
In May, Dave O’Hern got one of his two stolen bikes back when its new owner took it to a repair shop that recognised a crack in the frame. The new owner, law student Noel Merfeld, helped O’Hern set up a sting to catch the guy Merfeld bought it from. Police showed up and arrested a man who had been arrested in a similar bust two months earlier.
Gillum’s internet vigilantism is only the latest example, though, as ordinary people use the hi-tech methods to reclaim their possessions.
Last week Scottish biker Donald Pyper, 32, texted about 50 friends and used Facebook and Twitter to track sightings of his prized Harley-Davidson after it was stolen (he got it back). And in London, where bike theft has risen by a third, people seek to track down their wheels by posting on social media.
Last April the ex-England rugby captain Will Carling used the Find My iPhone app to trace his stolen iPad to a block of flats in Woking, and in California Joshua Kaufman became famous after spending weeks gathering photos and location data using a software package called Hidden to track down his stolen laptop.
The police are catching on, too. After the BBC’s home affairs correspondent, Tom Symonds, was mugged near his home, the Haringey Robbery Squad used an iPad to track his stolen phone’s GPS signal and collar the thief. Symonds was helped by the boys in blue, but is there a risk that going it alone will only get your head kicked in?
“Even without the police I would have tracked down my phone,” Symonds says. “It’s then a question of if you should march off, iPad in hand, to reclaim it. If I’d have done that I’d have probably ended up losing my iPad, too.”
Predictably, police are tight-lipped about victims taking justice into their own hands: “We welcome all the help people can give in investigating crimes, but you should always contact your local police station if you have any information.”
“You do need the police there to help you out,” Symonds says. “You don’t have the power to go to somebody, even if you think they are a criminal, and just demand they give up what they have on them.”
Criminals are getting wise to this new crime-fighting phenomenon. Ian Hyde, 23, had his phone stolen at knifepoint in Brixton, south London, recently. He had a tracking app installed and police quickly located his phone at a nearby shop.
“Just as we arrived they lost the signal,” Hyde says. “Most likely he’d taken the battery or SIM out.”
Hyde is philosophical though: “While I was momentarily tempted to go in and get it, I didn’t fancy going in there alone.” – The Independent