DORCHESTER, Mass. — Two Bay State bozos turned Facebook Marketplace into their personal joyride dealership — peeling off with ATVs and dirt bikes in exchange for rubber checks, cops say.
The brazen pair allegedly trolled the online marketplace for off-road wheels, shook hands with sellers, scribbled out personal checks and roared off into the sunset — long before the ink had a chance to bounce, according to Boston Police.
A joint sting by Boston PD's Auto Theft Unit and Milton cops came to a head at 9:10 a.m. on May 13, when officers stormed two homes with search warrants — one on Woodgate Street in Dorchester, the other on Sprague Street in Dedham.
The Dorchester raid turned up three stolen off-highway vehicles. The Dedham bust netted a fourth — a dirt bike — plus a firearm that, in the words of police, was "improperly stored."

Photo: Boston Police Department
The two suspects, both collared by Milton Police, are staring down charges of larceny of a motor vehicle, forgery of a check and uttering a false check.
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The alleged scam was almost laughably simple, investigators said: browse Marketplace, agree on a price, hand over a worthless check and disappear into traffic. By the time the bank flagged it, the sellers were left empty-handed — no machine, no money and no clue who'd just rolled out of their driveway.
Six more dirt bikes hauled off Richfield Street
The bouncing-check bust capped a banner week for the Auto Theft Unit. Just two days earlier — at 7:54 a.m. on Thursday, May 21 — officers raided a Richfield Street address in Dorchester and seized six more illegal dirt bikes, a rainbow row of blue, yellow and green machines loaded onto a flatbed tow truck.
All told, Boston Police pulled ten dirt bikes and ATVs off the streets across the two operations — and recovered one firearm.
'Bike life' bedlam
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The double bust comes as fed-up Bostonians have had it up to here with so-called "bike life" — roving packs of dirt bikes, ATVs, mopeds and scooters tearing through city streets in illegal takeovers, popping wheelies, blocking traffic and terrorizing neighborhoods at all hours.

A typical "bike life" street takeover — packs of dirt bikes and ATVs popping wheelies through traffic.
Last August, hundreds of riders flooded the Zakim Bridge and barreled into the O'Neill Tunnel in a coordinated takeover. One dirt bike slammed into a state police cruiser near D Street — and the rider bolted on foot.
The Boston Globe editorial board last fall branded the swarming riders a "nuisance", and Back Bay residents told Boston 25 back in 2024 they had zero faith in the city's summer crackdown. "No one is taking control," one neighbor griped.
And the dirt bike haul isn't the half of it: Boston Police have towed twenty scooters and mopeds across Hyde Park and Roxbury this month under Operation Safe Scooter, zeroing in on the same reckless-rider complaints plaguing those neighborhoods.

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