An Uber Eats driver turned amateur detective has recovered his stolen electric bike just days after it was stolen from outside a fish and chip shop.
Father-of-two Shakeel Ahmed Khan posed as a locksmith to get his £1,250 bike back.
The 36-year-old delivery man was picking up a takeaway order when a thief grabbed his bike from outside the restaurant.
The part-time dock worker ran out of the chippy, but it was too dark and the track-suit-wearing culprit had already taken off.
Although Mr Ahmed Khan reported this incident to the police straight away, he decided that he couldn’t wait for them to investigate.
‘I couldn’t wait for the police to get it sorted, I wanted to get it sorted as quick as I could,’ he said.
He still had the keys to the bike, and he knew the thief would need to take it to a locksmith in order to get the electric bike working again.
He said: ‘I started by calling all the repair shops and locksmiths I could find [in] the city – three had a call about a lost key and one was able to give me a phone number.’
He posed as a locksmith and reached out to the mobile number he received, even giving a quote for the cost of a replacement key to be made in order to sound more legitimate.
Mr Ahmed Khan got an address – he thought the thief would have been the person who contacted the locksmith, but it turned out to be the person who the Sheng Mi Lo electric bike was sold to.
He said the buyer told him ‘If you give me £60 I can give it back to you, it’s your bike’.
Mr Ahmed Khan said: ‘I was told the thief had sold it to the man I approached for £60 – I didn’t care what the situation was, I just wanted my back so I could provide for my children.
‘So, I gave him £60 and was reunited with my bike – I could finally take a real sigh of relief.’
A new electric bike would have set him back more than £1,000.
On why he paid to get his own stolen bike back, he said: ‘What I thought is if I’m getting this one back for £60, that’s fine.’
Mr Ahmed Khan earns more as a delivery driver in winter than he does in summer.
‘My delivery job pays more than my day job [in winter]. I was looking forward to spending more time on my delivery job,’ he said.
After his bike was stolen on September 25, it took Mr Ahmed Khan just two days to get it back.
‘This bike is like my bread and butter – its really important to me as it is how I make a lot of my income.
‘When I work Friday night and the weekend, I can make up to £100 a day – helping me provide for my two children,’ he said.
Mr Ahmed Khan, who obtained CCTV of the incident in his efforts as an amateur detective, said his wife thought he watched a lot of crime documentaries and that this was why he became an amateur sleuth when his bike was stolen.
The delivery driver now takes extra steps to make sure his bike is secure when he’s out doing deliveries – previously, he wouldn’t lock the bike up if he would be in and out of a takeaway shop in less than a minute.
‘Even if I’m going in and coming out, I’m going to lock it now,’ he said.
Hampshire Constabulary confirmed it had launched an investigation into the stolen bike shortly before it was recovered on September 27.
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