Scammers have found a way to make thousands of dollars a month moving bikes in New York City.
Citi Bike, a bike-share program operated by Lyft, is the largest of its kind in the country, with 25,000 bikes and more than 1,500 stations in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Jersey City and Hoboken.
To meet demand, the company is paying people looking to make a quick buck to move Citi Bikes from full docking stations to empty ones.
The program called Bike Angels was created in 2016 and encourages cyclists to move their bikes in exchange for points that could be used to earn rewards such as merchandise, membership discounts and gift cards.
Now people have found a way to maximize the system by monitoring the app and moving bikes from station to station a few blocks away to create a need for their services, then getting paid up to $6,000 a month to ride them a short distance back.
Citi Bike’s Bike Angels program encourages cyclists to move their bikes in exchange for points that could be used to earn rewards such as merchandise, membership discounts and gift cards.
“We thought people would do it as a form of recreational exercise. We never imagined that anyone would really become obsessed with it,” David B. Shmoys, a data scientist at Cornell University who helped create the rebalancing algorithm, told The New York Times.
Bike Angels noted that the algorithm awards points on a sliding scale based on need.
Removing a bike from a fully loaded station earns up to four points, and docking a bike at an empty station earns up to four more points.
People who move at least four bikes in a 24-hour period get all their points multiplied by a factor of three, according to The New York Times.
Lyft pays 20 cents per point and each ride can create a maximum of 24 points – ideally a person could earn up to $4.80 for a single ride.
Some Bike Angels found that by working together to reverse the shift in seasons they could maximise their profits.
“This is one of my side jobs. I’m probably a bit of a vulture in some people’s eyes. And I guess that’s fair,” said Mark Epperson, Bike Angel.
Some Bike Angels have discovered that if they work together to change stations by moving bikes from full docks to empty ones and then bringing them back, they can maximize their profits.
The company tracks its top-performing Bike Angels on a leaderboard and the current leader had accumulated 19,394 points as of Sept. 18, equivalent to $3,800.
In July, a Reddit user called out Bike Angels for abusing the system and hoarding bikes to make money instead of allowing users to use them.
“Seeing these people in action is very frustrating for a long-time member of the Bike Angel community. People like this should have their membership revoked,” the person wrote.
Investors told The Times that Lyft had tolerated his antics for years, but in August they received a warning about his behavior.
“It appears that many of your points were earned by participating in station changes,” the letter reads in part.
‘Continued instances of station change could result in the elimination of the Bike Angels program.’