In a video posted to the Berm Peak YouTube channel on Friday, founder Seth Alvo — aka Seth’s Bike Hacks — laid out a shocking bike scam that was carried out by one of his viewers.
“Someone pretended to be me and they successfully defrauded multiple bike companies, convincing them by email to ship tens of thousands of dollars worth of costly ebikes to an address in North Carolina,” he said in the video, which already has nearly half a million views.
All told, Alvo and his team estimate the haul was worth $50,000 and included about a dozen bikes. Though the video was posted just last week, Berm Peak communications manager Daniel Sapp told Singletracks he began to suspect something was up almost a year ago, in October or early November of 2024. Months later, in February 2025, the police visited the suspect’s home and removed bike-related items that were thought to have been related to the scam.
Is this really Seth?
According to the video, a representative from electric bike company Superhuman Bikes was one of the first to raise suspicions about the scam. Superhuman shared a screenshot of an email they received from someone claiming to be Seth with a gmail.com email address. Alvo suggests the scammer likely used generative AI to draft the message, which featured cringe-worthy references to testing bikes on a “thrilling one-mile descent” and even included screenshots of fake internal YouTube analytics.
Another bike brand, Goat Power Bikes, received a similarly suspicious request at around the same time. Alvo and Sapp asked Goat Power to play along with the scammer while they gathered more information. At one point, the scammer got spooked and reached out to Berm Peak via Instagram, apologizing for contacting Goat Power Bikes.
“Hi there. What are you talking about? Could you explain?” Sapp replied. “Wrong contact, my apologies,” the scammer wrote back. Now convinced he was not under suspicion and emboldened to expand his outreach, Alvo says the scammer contacted additional brands, including Scott Bikes and Salsa, both of which recognized that something was wrong.
Still, about a dozen brands were tricked into sending expensive bikes, including Transition Bikes. Sapp tells Singletracks that, as far as he knows, all the bikes were ultimately recovered by the Greensboro, NC, police department, though there’s no way to know for sure. All told, Sapp estimates the scammer contacted 100 or more bike brands as a part of the ruse.
Alvo said in the video that the scammer contacted him after his arrest in an attempt to explain himself. Though it’s been nearly a year since the suspect was identified and charged, the case is still working its way through the legal system.
“If you receive a message from a high-profile individual who you have never spoken with before, consider visiting their website or social account and confirming it’s really them,” Alvo says toward the end of the video. “If you’ve been scammed or even suspect fraud, file a complaint with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center at ic3.gov.”
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