Hunting down the owner of a found LOOK

Every now and then I get an email from someone who finds a bike and needs some help in locating the rightful owner.

This is the exception to the rule, natch, and not a primary goal of the website. But it demonstrates several parts of the bike theft and recovery equation that I'd like to talk about ...

All this week I've been working on locating the owner of a stolen LOOK carbon fiber [[model redacted]] racing bike found outside of Austin, TX. Long story short, there's an honest guy who found this insanely expensive, kitted-out LOOK bike stashed in the weeds on a rural field in the middle of backwoods nowhere Texas. Thinking that it was likely stashed there by someone waiting to come back and get it, this guy loaded it up, took it home, and started looking for an owner.

He tried the cops, and got nowhere there. He tried some local shops and a biking friend, who "posted it online" with no results. (Turns out this friend's entire post was "Anybody missing a LOOK? Friend of mine found one." I found the original post. Not such a great help, actually ...)

I got an email re: this bike about 7 days ago. Now, this is easily a $3k bike gone missing, so somebody out there has to be looking for it. Since contacted I've posted it to Atxbs, TXRBA, and Craigslist for Dallas/Austin/Houston, along with about a half dozen other smaller websites and biking forums.

(Little known fact, by the way - many carbon fiber bikes (and high end bikes in general) don't have serial numbers. Needless to say this makes recoveries way more difficult...)

So the word's out there, and we have all kinds of identifying details about the bike - this thing should be a slam-dunk recovery, right?

Unfortunately not.

So far we've had about a dozen inquiries, a couple of near misses, and a couple of wrong models/wrong color mismatches.

What depresses me (besides the asshats that accuse me of posting this just to get website traffic - those guys can go f themselves) is all the email people have sent me that doesn't have to do with this bike. The people sending me info about their own missing bikes is now three to one up on the inquiries about this stand-out bike that we actually have. I have five or six emailes re: other missing carbon fiber bikes, two re: store break-ins, and two or three re: bikes taken from inside people's homes.

Combine this with that James Clayton idiot they nailed in Austin and, man ... all I can say is that the situation's a lot worse than I thought.

And let's not forget the Craigslist scammer asshats who try and pry just enough information out of you so they can claim their 'lost' bike. Tell Craigslist responder A that it's a Grey model 1337-X - a model that doesn't even exist - and in half an hour you'll have Scammer asshat responder B emailing you and asking if you've found his Grey 1337-X.

I hate these people, and someone should find them and neuter them with a fork for wasting everybody's time and generally being lazy, moronic thieves.

Meanwhile, we'll keep looking for the owner of this LOOK. If you know anybody missing a LOOK within, oh, 100 miles of Kingsbury, TX, drop me a line.