Police-confiscated e-bikes for sale on the open market

A UK-based auction website ise selling e-bikes that have been confiscated by the police back to the public, potentially handing them back to the criminals they were taken away from!

We’ve found multiple vehicles for sale on the auction website, and while many of them are legitimate salvage vehicles and insurance write-offs, the ‘motorcycle/quad’ section is littered with the kind of bikes that plague UK towns and cities.

Clicking on the individual listings brings up more information about the machine being sold, and many of them are listed as being ‘sold at direction of police’, alongside performance data and the number of previous owners.

The kind of machines on sale vary. We found a Sur-Ron LBX Light Bee, which can have a top speed of around 50mph, sitting at £850. That’s a huge saving on the bike’s brand new RRP, which is around £3,500 to £4,000, depending on the spec level.

And it’s not just the electric bikes that are getting rehomed in this manner. The site also carries listings for enduro and motocross bikes from the likes of Husqvarna, Kawasaki, KTM and Yamaha.

There is even a listing for a seemingly theft-recovered BMW S1000 RR, which is being sold as a runner with the keys present. The bidding for that is currently sitting at £2,200.

It’s worth stressing that ‘sold at direction of police’ doesn’t necessarily mean that every bike has been seized from a criminal being prosecuted for using it. The listings can relate to vehicles recovered or otherwise disposed of at police direction, and the auction descriptions themselves warn buyers that some machines are non-identifiable and that their history cannot be guaranteed.

But the fact remains that motorcycles and e-bikes that have been taken out of circulation by the police can subsequently find their way back onto the open market.

That creates an obvious and slightly bizarre loophole. A machine can be seized because it has been used illegally, removed from the street and then, rather than being destroyed, sold to somebody else for cash.

In theory, there is nothing to stop the original owner, or somebody from the same group, from buying it back if the machine is sufficiently cheap and its identity has been removed. We have no evidence that this has happened with any of the bikes we've found, but the possibility is hard to ignore.

There is another important point for anyone tempted by the bargains. Many of these machines are not road legal. One Sur-Ron listing, for example, explicitly states that the bike cannot be registered for road use and is restricted to private land with the landowner’s permission.

So while a cheap police-seized bike might look like a bargain, it could also be a damaged, unidentifiable machine with no V5, no road registration and a rather murky history.

Still, if you thought every confiscated motorcycle ended up in a crusher, it turns out the reality is rather different.

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