E-scooter theft sparks fightback
Companies are playing cop to catch the robbers red-handed,
On a rainy Sunday in Brussels, two men prepared to fill a rented van with stolen e-scooters. They didn’t notice the hiding Wind employees, ready to catch them in the act.
In the e-scooter industry, theft is regular and costly. “From our knowledge of Paris, about 10 per cent of all e-scooters are stolen each month,” says Matt Turzo, chief operating officer for Berlin-based Wind. Turzo and managers in Brussels concluded that they needed to be more handson in curtailing this.
On July 28, Wind’s scooters were being dropped off in their usual starting positions in Brussels, having been stored and recharged overnight.
Two drop-off sites were routine stops on a drive-by route for thieves, who would snatch up these older models in trucks, strip away identifying materials such as GPS positioning sensors, then sell them or their valuable components. It wasn’t uncommon to see 20 or more vehicles vanish overnight in cities such as Brussels or Paris, Turzo says.
This time, Wind employees had been given cameras and were hidden near known hotspots for thieves.
On Avenue Louise, a MercedesBenz van pulled up beside eight Wind scooters that had been deposited just minutes earlier. One by one, the twowheelers were loaded into the back.
A Wind employee sent a WhatsApp message to colleagues hidden elsewhere. About 10 minutes later, the same vehicle arrived on Rue de Stassart, near another eight freshly-charged scooters.
Now the van’s occupants made a mistake. They began to remove GPS components from their haul before driving away.
Ordinarily, says Turzo, the removal would occur as the getaway driver had his or her foot firmly on the gas, speeding out of the city.
“We’d actually be able to plot their journeys on a map until the GPS was cut off,” Turzo says. “In one instance we found one of the comms units thrown into a farmer’s cornfield.”
But this time the delay gave Wind’s concealed employee time to call the police rather than just capture a photo of the truck’s number plate.
Soon afterwards, police arrived and handcuffed the van drivers.
About 15 scooters were recoverable from the back of the truck, with a stack of Wind’s disconnected GPS units. Prosecution is now under way.
Wind’s sting operation was not an isolated attempt to curb wholesale theft. Earlier in July, it began hiding secondary GPS trackers inside a small number of “dummy” scooters in cities where many vehicles were being lost.
The German company isn’t alone in having resorted to covertly photographing organised theft and vandalism to provide police with evidence. Lime, one of the world’s biggest e-scooter rental companies, has done so in some US cities, according to a person familiar with the practice who didn’t want to be named.
More broadly, e-scooter start-ups worldwide are moving away from using modified off-the-shelf versions of consumer models, typically manufactured by Segway-Ninebot or Xiaomi, instead favouring built-forpurpose units that can withstand tough terrain and careless riders. Wind’s new heavy-duty models, for instance, use metal frames rather than plastic, and feature custom electronics that make them far harder to hack, and more difficult to resell.
Turzo says that based on Wind’s observations of theft of these new vehicles, the 1500 e-scooters he estimates are stolen each month in
Paris “would drop to about 150”.
Martin Lefrancq, Smart Mobility co-ordinator for Brussels, says the rapid growth of the micro-mobility industry over the past year means the city’s regional authority is having to quickly learn lessons from projects such as Wind’s, and adapt to support it.
This includes the creation of a new taskforce of police, city officials and private companies, which will meet regularly to discuss issues such as vandalism and theft.
Turzo says Wind wants its new, heavy, custom-built models to be more naturally thief-proof.
“We don’t plan on making careers out of sting operations,” he says. “We want the solution to be built into the hardware.”