Townsville and ACT scrap Beam contracts over ‘scam scooters’
Beam Mobility executives allegedly plotted to expand its scooter scam to Perth, fresh documents reveal, as Townsville and Canberra become the latest cities to dump the company over the allegations.
Beam Mobility executives allegedly plotted to expand its alleged e-scooters scam to Perth, fresh documents suggest, as Townsville and Canberra become the latest cities to dump the company over the allegations.
The Australian has obtained more leaked internal correspondence between senior Beam staff which appears to show the global tech firm’s then-West Australian operations manager asked for help to “hide” 100 extra scooters from Perth local authorities.
“Following our slack conversation, can you help to hide additional vehicles in Perth (city id 17) using the vehicle event handler so they do not appear in the rider app? There are approximately 50 DV (deployed vehicles) at the moment that need to be hidden, we would like to increase that to 100 over the weekend,” the December 20 email from Beam’s then WA operations manager, Stuart O’Callaghan, reads.
Local governments in Brisbane, Auckland and Wellington – and now Townsville and the ACT – have dumped Beam Mobility and ripped up contracts with the Singapore-based e-vehicle company in the wake of reporting by The Australian that revealed Beam’s so-called Running Hot Project, and their own internal investigations.
The council probes, and previous leaked documents, showed Beam executives allegedly planned to subvert safety caps and cheat councils out of scooter registration fees by sneaking hundreds of extra scooters onto the streets of cities in Australia and New Zealand, to generate an extra $150,000 profit a month.
Beam allegedly provided false data to monitoring app Ride Report in order to hide the true number of scooters on the streets of certain cities.
The scooters were allegedly hidden so Beam would not have to pay councils annual registration fees for the extra vehicles (worth up to $650 per scooter in Brisbane) or a percentage of each fare.
In the newly obtained documents, Mr O’Callaghan – now based in Melbourne as Beam’s strategy and operations lead for Australia and New Zealand – reminds his colleagues that Perth Council does not use Ride Report, so Beam was making a special dashboard for authorities.
There’s also a heading “proposed solutions for cities without RR (Ride Report)” that could indicate the alleged scam has spread further than previously believed.
Mr O’Callaghan’s email was forwarded to other staff by Beam co-founder and president Deb Gangopadhyay on December 22 last year, asking “who’s best place (sic) with the DV optimisation project to help out here?”
A spokesman for Perth City Council said they had met with Beam Mobility management on Tuesday and “don’t believe there are any issues” with the number of deployed scooters exceeding the contracted cap.
Perth had been given a copy of the leaked correspondence ahead of the meeting.
“The City of Perth recently met with Beam and they confirmed an external audit is being conducted to assess any potential non-compliance,” the spokesman said.
“In the meantime, we will monitor the number of e-scooters in the city at any one time through a live dashboard.”
When asked whether Beam had deployed extra hidden vehicles in Perth, and whether any other local government was investigating the allegations, a spokeswoman for Beam declined to answer the specific questions.
Beam chief executive and co-founder Alan Jiang has previously apologised for Beam exceeding the vehicle caps in some cities, but insists it was unintentional.
On Wednesday, Townsville confirmed it had cancelled its contract with Beam, warning the company it had one month to remove its vehicles.
The ACT government said it would not renew Beam’s permit to operate 950 e-scooters in Canberra, after its own investigation.
“We believe Beam has failed to meet the expectations of the Canberra community under their permit to operate and therefore we will not be renewing their permit to operate,” the government’s deputy director-general of Transport Canberra and City Services, Ben McHugh said.
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