Metro joins recovery agents reclaiming London’s stolen bikes from thieves

Just a few metres from where I had parked, a stolen e-bike was pinging on our GPS tracker. For the past hour, we had been following its signal across east London. It had moved from Whitechapel to outside the Royal London Hospital, then onto the Elizabeth Line, before finally ending up here — around the corner from Ridley Road Market in Dalston.

Some days, recovery agents walk into addresses only to find stacks of stolen bikes. On other days, they climb tower blocks and use beacon signal technology to pinpoint the exact flat. And now, it was my turn to help confront the next bike thief.

BackPedal’s recovery agents can receive up to three reports a day about stolen bikes in London that they have fitted with trackers, as customers increasingly turn to them for help protecting their property. It’s not hard to see why. Last year, around 14,000 bikes were stolen in London, yet only 1% of cases resulted in a “positive outcome”.

The agent accompanying Metro was Bilal Ali, who was driving us in his family car to where the bike had been tracked. On the way, he told me stories of teenagers in balaclavas arriving with knives to stop him taking “their” bikes. But none of that has ever stopped Bilal from recovering one.

He said: “When you ask them what the bike’s frame number and vehicle identification number is, and they have no idea, that’s usually very telling. “And then when you show them all the tracking details we have, they just don’t have an argument.” Most of the time, people insist they have only just bought the bike. That may well be true, since thieves often sell them quickly at “too good to be true” prices to get rid of them.

This leaves people out of pocket by hundreds of pounds, while Bilal calmly explains that they’ve been scammed and that he is there to take the bike back. “We offer to be a witness if they choose to report the seller to the police,” Bilal said. He then laughed and added: “But they rarely follow up with us on this.

Almost like because a lot of the time, they have stolen the bikes themselves.” As we turned the corner in Dalston, the bike suddenly came into view, being pushed by a man in his 50s. Just as Bilal had predicted, he claimed he had bought it from a seller for £150. But he eventually handed it over reluctantly.

“If you have been sold a bike with no keys or charger, then it’s been stolen,” Bilal said. “You have to say to yourself, if a deal is too good to be true, then it probably is.” Co-founders James Dunn and Richard White launched BackPedal after both of their bikes were stolen. They described the scale of the problem as “so crazy it had become the norm” and wanted to “fight back.” James said: “A bike gets stolen every 2 minutes and it can feel incredibly hard to get the police to do anything.

“It’s something that stops people getting bikes in the first place and even using the bike that they do have. “For most people there’s no way to fight back about this. We set up to give them a way to fight back.”