Staged e-bike and scooter accidents are an ‘epidemic up and down the country’

The vulnerable nature of e-bike and scooter riders is increasingly being used by criminal gangs seeking to emotionally manipulate road users into admitting liability for staged collisions, said Damian Rourke, fraud specialist and partner at law firm Clyde and Co.

Rourke was addressing attendees of the Verisk Insurance Conference 2026 during a panel titled Vulnerable Road Users Claims Surge – Frequency, Fraud and the Cost Challenge.

One of the areas that Rourke highlighted as particularly concerning for insurers and road users alike was the growing use of scooters and e-bikes in “induced and staged” accidents.

In one common scam, scooter drivers park in the blind spot of a motor vehicle, while a criminal accomplice – often in a car of their own – attempts to induce an unsuspecting driver to reverse into the parked vehicle.

The effectiveness of the scam, he added, is achieved by exploiting the emotions people experience when perceiving that they have injured or endangered a vulnerable road user – someone without the protective features of a hard-shelled vehicle.

The scale of the activity is dramatic, with Rourke describing the activity as an “epidemic up and down the country”.

Indeed, his firm recently brought legal claims against 37 claimants, all working as part of a single organised gang in the Bristol area.

Rourke explained: “If you hit someone on a scooter, you’re immediately going to be terrified – and when people are terrified, it’s much easier get them at the scene, in shock, to admit liability.

“The values of these cons is significant. It’s not necessarily in the injury claim, in fact in many of the cases we looked at there’s no injury claim at all. It’s largely rooted in the replacement cost of a hire vehicle.

“The scooter which has been written off was hired out at hundred of pounds a day and these claims rapidly build up to having reserves of £30,000, £40,000, £50,000 a piece, all for a really offensive scam.”

AI-assisted solution

While the gangs that run such scams are highly sophisticated and tracing their activity can be incredibly difficult, Rourke believes that modern technology including artificial intelligence (AI) offers a potential tool with which to fight back.

“We are using lots of AI to gather data and sift through data. Large language models (LLMs) are terrific at doing that,” he concluded.

“In terms of helping us try to build networks of these gangs we’re dealing with in the scooter claims, you can put lots of information into secure LLMS and use them to process and develop links at a much more granular level than we have done historically.”