The owner of the top-end Riese & Müller e-bike didn’t report the theft until a few hours after it was actually stolen. A built-in GPS tracker by Darmstadt-based company IT’S MY BIKE (an IoT Venture brand) was able to accurately track the exact route that the stolen bike had taken up to that time: immediately after being stolen, the bike was moved to a car park located about a kilometre away. The next position it reported was in the Bahnhofsviertel, the area around Frankfurt’s main railway station. Unfortunately, the system failed to pinpoint the bike’s exact whereabouts at this time since the GPS signal was not precise enough.

 

The following evening, however, the IT’S MY BIKE Bike Hunter Team’s system sounded the alarm: the bike was moving again. The position data indicated that the bike had moved from the Bahnhofsviertel along the A648 to Steinbach (Taunus), fourteen kilometres away. There, it came to halt in a car park in an industrial park.

 

When the local police arrived at the scene, they found a suspicious vehicle with a foreign registration plate. When the officers asked for the vehicle to be opened, they were able to recover other bikes in addition to the e-bike worth around 8,000 euros they were looking for.

 

Photo: Symbol image / Adobe Stock