E-Bike Vigilantes Mount Up
With a global boom in electric bikes and a corresponding increase in theft, writing off the losses isn’t the only option.
Bike hunter John Griffoul on a search for a stolen Van Moof bike in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood.
Photographer: Jim McAuley/Bloomberg
Folkert Salomons and John Griffoul are the manager and assistant manager at the VanMoof bike shop in San Francisco. They spend most of their days selling and fixing the Dutch brand’s electric bikes. It is, by and large, routine customer service work. But once or twice or month, sometimes more as the need arises, the two take on a more exotic and dangerous job: bike hunters. With bolt cutters and metal grinders in their backpacks, they pedal the streets of San Francisco, scanning sidewalks, racks and alleys for missing VanMoof bikes that are sending a silent alarm from the cellular chips embedded in their frames.
“It is exciting,” says Griffoul, a 31-year-old former whitewater rafting guide who has been on the job for two years. “You’re puzzling out a mystery.”