Question for BiB - Police Auctions

[dr bob]

Not technically piston related, but transport - yes!

I need a new bike (a cheap one that works), and I thought i'd search the Web for the fabled Police auctions where you can pick up such things for a song... can I find any? Can I buggery - only dodgy sites promising lists for money (which I'm trying to avoid).

So are the Police selling all the unclaimed stuff through eBay or something? I did find something called bumblebee - but I couldn't figure out what was happening so I gave up and thought I'd ask humans!

I emailed my local County Constabulary (Kent), but haven't heard back yet.

Any resident BiB know anything about this - apologies if this is a bit of an unrelated question.

CH

[puggit]

Operation Bumblebee was a crackdown on petty theft IIRC.

I think these lists are fairly closed and you do need to be on a list to get notification. Kind of like a private club...

Try reposession auctions instead...

[KITT]

We used to get junk faxes at work once a week advertising Police auctions in Bristol. They stopped over a year ago though so maybe they don't run auctions any more?

[dr bob]

Found this one, which is for devon and cornwall

www.devon-cornwall.police.uk/v3/onlinserv/property/XcAPAuctionPro.asp

it also has other constabularies if you poke around for a bit (surrey is closest to me)... I just thought that they must be shifting all the unclaimed stuff somewhere... it just seemed justice that since I had a quite nice bike nicked, I should try to get one through an unclaimed property auction.

CH

[bobthebench]

Try the personal touch. Phone and ask for their lost property section, or custodier if they have one. They are usually happy to chat and will tell what they get, how often etc.

Out the blue emails are just spam, and usually ignored. The two major police auctioneers are Mannheim in Leeds and WOMA near Oxford, which hold sales once and twice monthly respectively. WOMA now has a web listing - go Google.