I had a brand-new scoot stolen from me about 1.5 years ago.
I had gotten over it, until recently when I came across some circumstances where having my scoot would have been really useful.. It brought back the feelings of frustration and extreme disappointment I went through. And it got me thinking..
What the hell happens to stolen motorbikes and scooters in NZ anyway?
When my scooter got stolen, I did some investigation (because the police did fuck all) and immediately found many other people who had had their scooters stolen in the previous few weeks/months (even from the same spot mine was stolen from - apparently it was a common occurrence). I am sure many, many others have been stolen since.
Where do these machines end up? What do the thieves do with them? Is there a black market in NZ for parts and vehicles, large enough such that stealing them here is actually lucrative?
I've known of this forum for years, and figure you'd be the guys to ask..
If you're curious as to the story with my scoot, read on in the spoiler tags..
My scooter was a PGO PMX Naked 50 Carbon. It was stolen on January 15 2017, from the bike-park in the Harvey Norman carpark on Tory Street, in Wellington.
The plate number was B1FWU; the engine number was P2H47013; the VIN was RFVPMMS21G1204770.
[spoiler]I reported it to the police straight away, but also decided to do my own searching.
I managed to get in contact with the building manager for the HN building, who sure enough had security footage showing two people, a man and a woman, fiddling with my scooter and wheeling it away in the early hours of the morning. I arranged to get a hold of the footage so I could give it to the cops.
Long story short, the building guy went on holiday for 2 weeks, and while he was gone, the security system deleted the footage. And with that, my only hope of getting my scoot back went up in smoke.
At this point, it had been a couple weeks since the incident, and I asked the guy if the police had been in touch with him in any way; he said: no, not at all. I know for a fact that a police officer had been assigned to my case, because I had been advised of this by a stolen vehicle hotline operator. If I, a civilian, got so close to obtaining hard evidence so easily, what the fuck was the police doing all that time? The answer is probably: nothing; nothing at all.
That was the last I heard of anything. I never got anything back, because I didn't have insurance on the scooter, which is the worst thing about all of this. I had kept humming and hahh'ing about which provider to get, and kept putting it off. This was 100% stupid and as a result, this is all my own fault. Doesn't make any of it less frustrating
It's only a scooter, but I'm a student and I had saved up a long time to be able to buy it; it meant a lot to me. Even though it's not glamorous like a proper bike, I think the experience of losing it will be the same - especially when it represented a sizable amount of your own hard labour.[/spoiler]
What even happens to stolen bikes/scooters in NZ? (+stolen scooter story)
