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Comment by ewams | Hacker News Reader

Could you explain a little better on how this works?

Bird Chargers are people who charge Bird e-scooter for rewards. They take Birds with low battery from the streets, charge them, and release them the next morning to collect their rewards. Each Bird has a different reward for charging. The company's reward algorithm seems to give higher reward for Birds that have been abandoned for a longer time. So the Bird chargers can just take Birds, "abandon" them in their backyard, wait until their rewards reach maximum, finally they will charge them and release them to get max rewards.

Quite like farming, really.

It rather seems to me that Bird would know where the scooter was being charged, and where it was accumulating value in a fixed location. They can correlate this information

Bird really need to structure it better, and make it clear that such actions are fraudulent. The people involved need to lose their licence to charge and their user accounts and then they won't have any way to make money or use the scooters.

It rather seems to me that Bird would know where the scooter was being charged, and where it was accumulating value in a fixed location. They can correlate this information

Then people will use their grandma's backyard to "abandon" them and charge at their house.

Better than Grandma, you start a black market scooter trading network with like-minded folks.

From the companies perspective they have lots of data to analyze. I am not a statistician but I suspect that people who game the system in any way that we can think of will show up at the top of the dataset. The two most important metrics are the highest total earners and the users with the highest average charging fee. They get subjected to extra scrutiny. Plot out where they were getting the scooters from, and who used the scooters last, then if it turns out they are being fraudulent just kick them out or modify the processes so that what they do doesn't work.

I suspect in the early days it doesn't really matter, since they will want fully charged scooters and a rumour you can make lots of money to incentivize people to join.

They also probably have a shortage of data scientists to do the analysis. The ones they have are probably working on projects that more directly affect the bottom line, rather than eliminating externalities.

It seems like Bird has a program that pays people to charge their scooters overnight.

On paper, it seems like the idea is that if you were in this program and you found a scooter, you could take it home with you, charge it, then drop it off on a curb somewhere the next day and you'd be paid for charging it.

In reality, they didn't account for how people actually behave. So people are picking up scooters and "keeping" them in their apartments/houses to let the batteries drain more(?), until it gets to a point where charging it would be most profitable.

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