Is this bike stolen?
Every other page here answers “how old is it”. This one answers a question people ask with money in their hand — and it is the only page on this site where somebody else has already done the hard part. Bike Index is a free, open register of bicycles with a stolen flag on every record, and they let anyone search it.
bikeindex.org and nowhere else. Nothing is
stored by this site and there is no account, but the request does leave your device, and if
the bike is yours the serial identifies it.
What “no match” means, which is nothing
A result of nothing is not a clean bill of health. It is the single most important thing on this page, and it is why the tool above will never print the words “not stolen”. There are at least four reasons a search comes back empty, and only one of them is good news:
- The bike was never registered with Bike Index. Most bikes are not.
- It was stolen and never reported there.
- The serial was typed differently by whoever registered it — a letter O for a zero, a dropped hyphen.
- You mistyped it, or misread a worn stamping.
We tested that last one. Taking a real stolen bike's serial and changing one character returns zero results — exactly what an unregistered bike returns. Nothing in the answer distinguishes them.
A partial serial is worse than useless
The obvious thing to try, when the full serial does not work, is a bit of it. Here is what actually happens. We took the serial of a real bike listed as stolen on Bike Index and searched for each of its prefixes in turn:
| What was searched | What came back |
|---|---|
| The first 3 to 6 characters | Other people's bikes — up to 2,468 of them, and never the one we wanted |
| The first 7 to 12 characters | Nothing at all |
| The whole serial | The right bike, and only that bike |
Longer is not steadily better. Matching is on whole space-separated chunks of the stored serial, not on how much of it you have, so more of the number can return less. Six characters found two strangers' bikes; twelve found nothing; thirteen found the right one. Type the whole thing or do not bother — and if a partial search returns a bike, that is not your bike, it is somebody else's with a similar number.
What the four answers mean
A record carries a status, and only one of them is the alarming one:
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| stolen | Reported stolen and not recovered. Do not buy it. |
| found | Somebody has found it and is looking for the owner. |
| impounded | Held by a police force or other body. |
| with owner | Registered, and not reported stolen. |
“With owner” does not mean the person in front of you is that owner. It means somebody registered the bike and has not reported it missing. If you are buying, a registered bike whose seller cannot show you the registration is a worse sign than no record at all.
What Bike Index is, and what it is not
Bike Index is a non-profit register. Anyone can add a bike, anyone can report one stolen, and anyone can search. That openness is the reason this page can exist and it is also its limit: the register knows what people have told it. It is not a police database, it does not cover every country evenly, and a bike absent from it is simply a bike nobody entered.
They let this page ask. Their API documentation says “Every endpoint on the Bike Index API supports Cross-Origin Resource Sharing”, which is what lets your browser call them directly rather than this site standing in the middle — your search does not pass through us. They also say “There is increased rate limiting for unauthenticated requests”. This page does not use a key, so if you search repeatedly you may be throttled; that is theirs to set and we do not know the figure.
If this page is useful to you, they are the ones who did the work. Bike Index run on donations and they maintain the register that makes the answer possible. This page is a search box in front of somebody else's decade of effort.
And no, this will not tell you how old it is
The rest of this site dates things. Bicycles mostly cannot be dated from the serial at all: frames are numbered by the factory that welded them rather than the brand on the down tube, the same frame turns up under several names, and almost no maker publishes a chart. The register above will show you a year when the person who registered the bike typed one in — which is a claim by an owner, not a decoding of the number.
If you want the manufacturer's own dating schemes, the pages that have them are motorcycles, boats, air conditioners and tools. For bicycles there is no such page to build honestly, and that is the finding.