As cycling is becoming more and more popular in Europe, bike theft is a real plague nowadays. Indeed, between
2.5 million and 3 million bikes are stolen each year across the 5 largest European countries: France, Italy, Spain, Germany and UK. There are around 500,000 malicious cases in Netherlands and 35,000 in Belgium. But these are based only on the official figures reported from police records. Reality might be even higher than that.