Shared e-scooter startup Beam Mobility has positioned a whole bunch of additional “phantom” scooters on metropolis streets in Australia and New Zealand to keep away from paying car registration charges to native governments, in response to a two-part report from The Australian.
Cities place caps on the variety of automobiles operators can deploy to keep away from saturating streets and sidewalks with scooters that might endanger pedestrians.
The Australian’s scoop contains leaked Slack messages and different paperwork detailing how Beam offered false knowledge to impartial monitoring app Ride Report to understate the variety of scooters in cities comparable to Brisbane, Canberra, Adelaide, Auckland and Wellington.
One doc, which incorporates Beam co-founder Deb Gangopadhyay’s identify, describes Beam’s plan to deploy a further 1,000 scooters into the “finest areas” of these cities, with the aim of producing a further $150,000 revenue.
Beam final raised $135 million from high-profile buyers, together with Affirma Capital and Peak XV Partners (previously Sequoia India and SEA).
