UK company BackPedal specializes in recovering stolen e-bikes directly from thieves

BackPedal in the United Kingdom is taking bicycle theft protection to the next level and it has bike owners around North America hoping for an expansion or a similar service.

Bicycle theft continues to be a vile plague in most large cities worldwide. In the United States, 1.7 million bikes are stolen every year. Most bikes are never found, and many are shipped away as quickly as they are swiped. But there might be hope on the horizon in an ambitious company called BackPedal.

“What we are is an e-bike theft protection and recovery service,” says BackPedal founder James Dunn. “We use GPS trackers and Bluetooth beacons. We can supply these to people but also work with leading brands. Really what we care about is being able to find the bike when it gets stolen, because the unique part of our proposition is we’ve got a network of recovery agents around the country.”

So, when someone’s bike gets stolen, Dunn says BackPedal jumps into action and does all of the legwork to get it back.

“Everything from handling the police through to deploying our agents, through to recovering the bike and getting it back to the customer,” Dunn says.

Often, Dunn will video recovery operations and post them to social media channels. He’s always been a part of the bicycle community since his first job delivering newspapers by bicycle to working as a bike shop mechanic. So, bike theft has always been front-and-center.

 

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Everything from handling the police to deploying our agents, through to recovering the bike and getting it back to the customer.

“I just always kind of view cycle crime as just something that existed when I was a kid, when I was an adult,” he says. “But it wasn’t until my girlfriend’s bike got stolen that I decided to do something. She is a teacher and she used to cycle to work every day.”

Dunn couldn’t understand why bike thefts weren’t being solved, and he decided to do something about it. The response has been great.

“Response has been super strong,” Dunn says. “It’s a really nice problem to work on in the way that people want us to succeed.”

Although Dunn has been on the response team on a number of occasions it is largely made up of retired police officers, military veterans and other security professionals.

“These aren’t full-time members of our team, but what we do is we recruit enough of them so that when a bike gets stolen, we can deploy someone,” Dunn explains. “So what happens is a bike gets stolen in Brentford, and we’ll look up our database of people who are around and close enough. We’ll ping them and find the one or two who are able to get out there quickly and start recovering. That’s the key part. We need people to be able to respond really quickly.”

Although recovery sometimes requires access to private property, BackPedal makes sure to let local police know what they are doing.

“If anything, it’s a civil offense of trespass rather than a criminal offense,” says Dunn, who adds that they are relying on the person who stole the bike in the first place not suing.

“If we know about it in a garden, say, you’re not going to get sued by the person who’s stolen that bike,” he adds. “We’ve got the tracking info, sometimes we can see it as well. So that’s an example. As a default, we try to get the police to come out and do that sort of stuff though.

“When asked if there has been any problems associated with the more aggressive style of bicycle recovery, Dunn says only the ones you would “sort of expect.”

“Our job is to judge the risk and deploy the people with the right skill sets to be able to solve it,” he adds.

So far, BackPedal has a success rate of an incredible 89 percent with a few hundred customers across the UK since beginning operation 18 months ago. The hope is to continue expanding to cover most parts of the United Kingdom and all the urban centers with recovery agents that the company is recruiting.

“Basically it’s about growing customers,” says Dunn, who founded the company alongside Richard White. “We’re principally doing that through partner retailers. So, bike shops that already fit trackers. We let them know about our service and they really like it.”

Until someone expands BackPedal to North America, download our bike theft guide here.