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  "description": "22 bikes a day are stolen in Melbourne. I decided to buy one to return it to its rightful owner – and went for a ride with a self-proclaimed outlaw.",
  "path": "/the-afterlife-of-a-stolen-bike/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-03-05T01:22:46.000Z",
  "site": "https://escapecollective.com",
  "tags": [
    "A letter to my bike thiefHandover notes from one bike owner to another.Escape CollectiveIain Treloar",
    "a classic #2",
    "Curve Cycling",
    "Subscribe now"
  ],
  "textContent": "New to Escape Collective?\n\n### Independent cycling journalism, funded by members.\n\nThis story is a reported investigation into bike theft, recovery, and the strange realities that sit behind a stolen listing online.\n\nMost of our deepest reporting is for paying members. We’ve opened part of this piece so you can experience the depth of Escape Collective before the registration wall.\n\nKeep reading. You’ll be able to unlock the rest with a free email.\n\n_“You should write about my life,” the bike thief said, as we rode under the freeway, trucks roaring above us. Maybe I will, I said._\n\n_I’d gone in trying to get a stolen bike back to its owner. Now, I realised, I was in over my head._ _The path was empty. No pedestrians; no other cyclists. Just the two of us, a muddy creek with trolleys in it, and concrete pillars tagged with old graffiti._\n\n_As he hung off my back wheel, I wondered what a bullet would feel like. Whether you hear it before it hits you, and whether it was worth it for a story about someone else’s stolen bike._\n\n## **Chapter 1: The psychic wound**\n\nA couple of years ago, I walked out of a bar and found my bike had been stolen. There were a few phases of grief that I went through in the aftermath – anger, denial, bargaining – but after all that settled down, I ended up with a kind of numb acceptance. I think the best way to describe it, probably, is like a kind of psychic wound.\n\nNew bikes have come and gone, but the wound remains. Most days, just on the off-chance, I take a quick look on Facebook Marketplace in the hopes that my trusty, crusty old Cannondale will show up there, maybe clumsily rattle-can sprayed, maybe stripped to constituent parts. Regardless of condition, I’m certain that I’d still recognise it anywhere. Probably always will.\n\nA letter to my bike thiefHandover notes from one bike owner to another.Escape CollectiveIain Treloar\n\nMy bike hasn’t shown up, but in the process I’ve seen how many other suspicious deals there are. Bikes that are way nicer than they should be for the prices asked. Bikes where the seller doesn’t really seem to have any idea of what they have.\n\nThere's a small sliver of this cohort that are just elderly and bewildered – I liberated another dusty old Cannondale from one such guy, and fixed it up for a mate to ride. But usually, there’s a combination of indicators that make clear that a bike has probably been stolen: the photos are usually out of focus and poorly framed, the details in the listing are limited, and the sellers often have recent accounts under fake names.\n\nAnd whenever such a bike pops up, I look at them and wonder. I wonder where the bike came from, and how it ended up being sold for a fraction of its worth, and the desperation that led to it being stolen in the first place.\n\nBut another part of me just sees the bike as an anthropomorphised screen onto which the hopes and dreams of the rightful owner can be projected – flickering sepia adventures they took together. I see a bike, and I imagine the owner going through the same emotions I did – sad and angry and with a psychic wound of their own.\n\nSo, when one such obviously stolen bike popped up on Facebook Marketplace the other day, I decided to do what I’d hope someone else would do for me, with my bike: I decided to try to help that bike find its way home.\n\n __For an audio version of this story, listen to the latest episode of the Rabbit Holes podcast:__\n\n## **Chapter 2: The marketplace of stolen things**\n\nWhen I saw the listing, it was less than an hour old. I’m not sure what it was that Meta’s algorithms saw in it to bring it to my feed: an asking price of $200, and just four blurry pictures, none of them showing the bike in its entirety. There were no sizing details; the description said ‘Graphite mountain cruiser’ – whatever that even is – and everything about it seemed deeply fishy. The description, in full, read that it was “twin disc with excellent tyres and new type of gear change to make it easy to go up or down roads it’s very light and only clearing out my garage so grab it as it’s priced to sell.” In other words, a classic #2.\n\nBut there was some branding. The wheels were from Melbourne brand, Curve Cycling. The fork looked like it was from Curve, too. Because the pictures were essentially useless at identifying any other specifics, I then had to make some informed guesses. The skinny-tubed steel frame looked a _bit_ like a Curve, but with sliding dropouts that I know the brand had last commercially released a bike with about a decade ago. Even so, as rough as the pictures looked, it was obvious that this was worth more than the $200 asking price, and the little purple valve caps in the pictures told me that it once had an owner that loved it.\n\nThe entirety of the photographic record.\n\nAnd there was one tiny clue to follow: A little round sticker half-visible on the frame, which looked like the branding of a bike shop on the other side of the world, a British stockist of Curve called G!RO Cycles. I had no idea what the frame was or how it ended up in Australia, but there was at least a lead of where to start looking for its owner.\n\nWithin 50 minutes of the listing being online, I was messaging the seller, who for the purposes of this story I’ll call ‘Jack’. I asked for a single clear photo of the bike, and if he had any idea about sizing. His response dodged both questions: “it’s pretty good and I’m in Glenroy” – a gritty industrial suburb I’d never been to on the opposite side of Melbourne. I asked again for some more pictures, explaining that I was pretty keen but didn’t really want to drive for an hour on the basis of almost no information. No response.\n\nThe next morning, before 6am, a message pinged into my Messenger inbox:__ “I will TX you if not bought as l have 2 peoples 1 in this early day and 1 around 2ishok and 200 down in my pocket before traveling on my bike test ride ok 👍\". As chance would have it, I was up early (a child had made the night-time shift to The Big Bed; her pointy elbows had forced me awake).\n\nIt hadn’t been a good sleep even so: I’d spent half the night thinking about how I had this rare chance to help this bike find its way back to its home, and now realised it was close to slipping away. I sent another message to the seller: I would take it, sight unseen. He asked for me to transfer the full amount over to hold it, which I didn’t _love_ , so we reached a compromise: “$50 deposit and its yours my friend,” he wrote. “Please don’t waste my time.” Money whooshed from my account to his, and the deal was done.\n\n## **Chapter 3: Into the unknown**\n\nAfter dropping the kids off at school, I checked his profile one last time, saw a post he’d made about being “a gun licensed outlaw” and drove for an hour through suburbs I'd never been to, over near the airport. The roads got flatter, less tree-lined. Finally, I pulled up outside a white brick house with a small wire fence separating scrubby grass from the road. A car with no engine sat stripped in the front yard, a tarpaulin sagging over its missing heart. An empty cat box sat on the curb beside some old steel drums. The rusty corrugated fence through to the back of the house looked familiar as the backdrop from the photos. I knocked, and through a thick screen door heard movement. “How's it going?” I called into the gloom. “I've been better,” said Jack as he shuffled outside.\n\nI’m not interested in stigmatising the addicted and unwell, but Jack had clearly had a rough life. As he pulled the bike out from behind the gate, he immediately led with how he'd got the price wrong. “My brother’s going to kill me,” he said. Jack was supposed to sell it for $600, he said, but he had listed it for $200. “Everyone wants to buy it,” he said, pulling out a phone with a cracked screen that he scrolled through his Facebook messages on. “Look here – graphite, graphite, graphite,” he said, pointing at them one by one with a shaking finger. “You’ve got a bargain,” he told me. “I was drunk when I listed it … Anyway, you fucking owe me $400. I don’t know what to do, mate. What do I do, give you back your money?”\n\n“So, you don’t want to sell it now?”, I asked. “No, really, I don’t,” he said. I said I'd driven for an hour, and that we had a deal, and then reminded Jack that he’d asked me not to waste his time, and that I expected him to not do the same. To defuse the growing tension I asked to take the bike for a spin to check its condition; he asked for my car keys as insurance, and I gave him the three $50 notes folded in my pocket instead.\n\nAfter a quick up and down the street, with the deal still hanging in limbo, we chatted some more. While I’d been riding, he’d popped inside and emerged with a white coffee in a plastic cup, and a half-eaten pack of hot cross buns. Trying to change the subject, I talked about how good hot cross buns are, and he asked if I wanted one. I said I wasn’t hungry and that I’d just brushed my teeth but he insisted, and reached in to break one off in the pack, passing it over to me. It was a bit stale, but I picked at it slowly. At one point, when I stopped eating to adjust the bike with the folding tool I'd brought in my pocket, he noticed, coldly observing that “you're not eating your bun.” I explained that I needed both hands to work on the bike, and, after a curdled pause he gave a sly smile to accept my response.\n\nMember preview\n\n###  This investigation is normally available only to paying members.\n\nEscape Collective is funded directly by readers. We’ve opened this section so you can experience the depth of our reporting before the registration wall.\n\n**Share your email to unlock the rest of this story.**\nYou’ll also get access to selected articles, podcasts, racing coverage, and more of the journalism that makes Escape Collective different.\n\nWant full access to everything we publish, including member-exclusive investigations, reporting, race analysis, and tech features?\nYou can join any time using the **Join Today** button at the top of the page.\n\nComing next in this story:\n\n  * A tense ride with the man selling the stolen bike\n  * The moment the bike’s real owner is found\n  * What stolen bike recovery actually looks like in practice\n  * The bigger picture of theft, risk, and why so few bikes make it home\n\n\n\n### This post is for subscribers only\n\nBecome a member to get access to all content\n\nSubscribe now",
  "title": "The afterlife of a stolen bike",
  "updatedAt": "2026-03-24T02:53:03.915Z"
}