Tips against bike theft: What to do against road bike theft?

Protection in social networks

Platforms such as Strava make it easy for bike thieves: recorded routes often lead thieves who are planning to steal a bike right to your front door. In your privacy settings, make sure that your place of residence cannot be recognised by strangers. Route names such as "Daily commute" are also dangerous. Criminals can deduce not only where you live and work, but also if and when you are on holiday. Photos are another risk: If you take pictures on your mobile phone and upload them to Strava or Facebook, you must remove the metadata. Otherwise, the exact location of your photo can be determined via the geodata.

Beware of bike theft in hotels

You should be particularly careful with jointly organised or professionally offered bike tours. If possible, do not share the names or addresses of shared accommodation on the internet - potential thieves can easily find out which hotel cellar contains a lot of expensive racing bikes. If possible and permitted, you should also take your racing bike with you to your hotel room instead of locking it in the basement of your accommodation.

• More about theft protection

Bicycle theft: watch out at events

RTF, everyman or licence races are particularly interesting for gangs of thieves specialising in racing bikes. If you are distracted during the refreshment break or at the award ceremony, you will quickly lose your bike. Police officer Stefan Kliesch advises: "At large events, you should take a lock with you as an exception, such as a cable lock, to prevent a thief from being able to ride away quickly." Under no circumstances should you leave your racing bike unattended in a car or van in the car park. This makes bike theft easy.

And if it did happen?

1. Notify the police
   Report the bike theft to the local police as soon as possible. You will need the theft certificate for the insurance company. Have your bike pass, frame number and photos to hand.
2. Report damage to the insurance company
   Report the bicycle theft to your insurance company. In addition to the police confirmation of loss, you will also need the purchase invoice and, if possible, proof that the bicycle was stored safely.
   yourself
3. Research
   Doing your own research on various online sales portals is useful and can supplement police work. Tip: Set up a search on ebay, ebay classifieds and other classified adverts with automatic notification. In some cases, even a banal Google search is successful and leads stolen racing bikes to a hit on a national or international sales portal. Sometimes luck is even closer: searching in local used bike shops or flea markets has already brought many a racing cyclist joyful reunions.