What It Is: The National Bike Registry (NBR®) is the only national bicycle registration database that helps identify and return stolen bikes and scooters to their rightful owners. With a low-cost, simple registration, bicycle and scooter owners can record the serial number and description of their property, and tag that property with a special label to indicate that it is registered.

Why It’s Important: More than one million bikes are stolen each year. While half of those bikes are recovered, only two percent get returned to their owners due to lack of a way to match the recovered bike to the owner. In contrast, every time a police officer has recovered a bicycle that was in the National Bike Registry database, it has been returned to the owner. Also, often the label alone deters a thief, who realizes it will be harder to resell an obviously stolen bike.

The Company: National Bike Registry was founded in 1984. It is now part of BoomerangIt, the global lost and found service for all types of property. It has grown to become the only nationwide bicycle and scooter registration service.

Why It Works: The National Bike Registry is successful because it is national in scope, whereas registering a bike with the local police department is only effective if it is the police in that town who recover the missing or stolen bike.

Scope: More than 16,000 police departments coast-to-coast look for the National Bike Registry label on any found or recovered bicycle. The NBR database is available to law enforcement nationwide through secure password-protected access. NBR is an official licensee of the National Crime Prevention Council and McGruff^® ID Armor^® the Crime Dog. The National Bike Registry is a leader in the bike security industry with more than 300,000 registered bikes. Leading bike manufacturers such as Diamondback, Giant, Huffy, Kryptonite, Mongoose, Raleigh, Razor and others include NBR protection with their products.

Outlets: National Bike Registry labels, in addition to being sold online, can be purchased at more than 3,500 retail locations around the country including R.E.I. For just $10, a bike or scooter owner gets a 10-year registration. Other registry packages offer family rates for multiple bikes or a 30-year transferable membership, to cover subsequent purchased bicycles.