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Report: BikeBandit Bankruptcy Raises Serious Questions, Customers Left Holding The Bag


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If you’ve ever ordered motorcycle parts online, chances are you’re aware of US-based BikeBandit. What you might not know is, the e-retail pioneer is now going through bankruptcy proceedings, and there are some serious and troubling questions raised after BikeBandit customers paid for parts or gift cards, and did not receive them, after the bankruptcy proceedings started.

There have been rumblings about this online, including the ADVrider forum (links below), but I certainly hadn’t heard about anything until I saw this article in Jalopnik. I think I’ve bought parts from BikeBandit for some project or other, but it’s been years. I’ve rarely shopped online for anything in the US since the start of COVID regulations; I’m in Canada, and it’s just too much hassle to deal with cross-border pickups, at this point.

However, according to that Jalopnik article, which references bankruptcy proceeding documents, plenty of other motorcyclists have had trouble with BikeBandit in recent months, and now the company owes them hundreds of thousands. According to court paperwork, many customers have placed orders on the BikeBandit’s website in recent months, and not received what they’ve paid for. BikeBandit filed for bankruptcy in February of 2022, but until sometime in April, the company was allegedly still taking payment for orders placed on its website—but many of these orders were not shipped. As per the court docs:

While additional discovery is needed, there is already ample evidence that the Debtor’s sworn bankruptcy papers filed in the case are factually untrue in material respects. Many creditors were omitted from the Debtor’s sworn bankruptcy papers. For example, all of Debtor’s consumer creditors, many (possibly thousands) of whom deposited money with the Debtor that the Debtor later absconded with and others who purchased gift cards or earned “points” in a rewards program Debtor operated prepetition are altogether omitted from the Debtor’s sworn bankruptcy papers.

It remains unclear why the Debtor continued to operate its business well past the point of insolvency and, even worse, continued to accept online orders when it was apparent the Debtor would not be able to fulfill those orders. The Trustee is informed and believes that the Debtor contemplated filing bankruptcy as early as February 2021 and was unable to pay its debts as they came due no later than by that time. Despite these facts, the Debtor continued to accept online orders and charge consumers’ credit cards at least until weeks or days before the petition date, for orders that it was knowingly unable to fulfill from its available inventory. The Trustee also believes that the Debtor collected sales taxes on these phantom sales that were never returned to the consumer or remitted to the proper taxing authorities.

What they’re saying is, BikeBandit’s bankruptcy paperwork doesn’t list many individual customers who got shafted when they paid for product, and BikeBandit didn’t deliver.

For more examination of the financial intricacies of this deal, including questions as to why BikeBandit actually went bust (the paperwork says it’s in debt, but that debt is apparently owed to the company’s owner?), you should read the Jalopnik article. For what it’s worth, there has been a decent amount of criticism of BikeBandit here in the forum over the years—see here, here, here, and more recently, here. Of course there is always complaint and criticism that follows any online business, but this cloud of bad vibes has followed the company for years, and it seems it’s all come to a head now.

Vezi sursa

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