Last month Singletracks reported that a shipment of 337 Ari bikes, valued at $1.7M, went missing while in transit from California to the company’s Utah warehouse. Yesterday, Tyler Cloward, Director of Product Development at Ari Bicycles, shared some good news, saying that 288 of the bikes have been recovered.
“As you guys may have seen a couple weeks ago, we lost an entire truckload of bikes, 337 bikes,” Cloward says in an Instagram video posted yesterday. “Just this last week, we were able to recover 288 with your help, the Cargo CATS of LA County Sheriff, [Lonnie of Santa Clarita bike shop], and all the leads you sent in. We got dozens and dozens of leads, sent us bikes being sold online. We were able to chase down some information with that, pass that to the Cargo CATS division, and they were able to track down these bikes.”
Cloward doesn’t say exactly how or where the bikes were recovered, but notes that, fortunately, the bikes are still in their sealed packaging.
“We have had a lot of questions of how this happens,” he said. “We use […] brokers to hire trucking, and they resell it and move it around. And this turns out, it looks like it’s a case of fraud, impersonation, false pickups, some bad information.”
Days after the heist was discovered in April, Cloward told Singletracks, “We know the truck was driven up to Santa Clarita. We suspect it was unloaded somewhere in the area.” He went on to say the truck was later found, but it already had someone else’s cargo inside. At the time, the crime was characterized as fraud and impersonation.
Though the majority of the bikes have been recovered, there are still 49 bikes that remain unaccounted for, and Ari is asking anyone with information to help them track down the remaining bikes.
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