Just meters away from where I was parked, a stolen e-bike was pinging our GPS tracker.
We had travelled around east London following the signal for the past hour.
It had moved from Whitechapel, to outside the Royal London Hospital, went on the Elizabeth Line before ending up here – round the corner from Ridley Road Market in Dalston.
Some days see recovery agents enter addresses to find a hoard of stolen bikes. Others see them climb up tower block, locating the exact flat using beacon signal technology.
And now it was time for me help to confront their next bike thief.
Recovery agents at BackPedal can receive up to three reports a day of stolen bikes in London that they have fitted with a tracker as customers turn to them to help protect their property.
And it’s no wonder. Last year around 14,000 bikes were stolen in London, and only 1% of cases led to a ‘positive outcome’.
The ]agent accompanying Metro was Bilal Ali, who was driving us to where the bike was in his family car.
On the way, he tells me stories of balaclava-clad teenagers with knives turning up to stop him taking ‘their’ bikes. But this has not stopped Bilal from ever recovering one.
He said: ‘When you ask them what the bike’s frame number and vehicle identification number (VIN) 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 just recently bought the bike. This could be possible, as thieves sell fast at ‘too good to be true prices’ to get the stolen vehicle off their hands.
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This leads people hundreds of pounds down, with Bilal gently explaining they have been scammed and he is taking the bike back.
‘We offer to be a witness if they choose to report the seller to the police,’ Bilal said. He added, laughing: ‘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 rounded the corner in Dalston, the bike suddenly appeared before us, being pushed by a man in his 50s.
Just like Bilal said, he insisted he had just bought the bike off a seller for £150. But he reluctantly handed it over.
‘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 good to be true, then it probably is.’
Co-founders James Dunn and Richard White set up BackPedal after both had their bikes stolen.
Describing the scale of thefts as ‘so crazy it had become the norm’, they 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.’
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