A man and a woman have been arrested and charged with burglary after police acted quickly to track down the perpetrators of an “aggressive” ram raid on an e-bike showroom, leaving the shopfront “effectively destroyed”.
Two e-bikes were stolen during the overnight break-in at Uprise Bikes Electric in Swansea earlier this month, which saw a van – reported by police to be stolen itself – deliberately driven into the shop’s entrance, causing “severe” structural damage that the company’s co-founder believes will cost tens of thousands of pounds to repair.
The showroom in Fforestfach, which forms the e-bike branch of Swansea-based specialist cycling retailer Uprise Bikes, was forced to temporarily close on Monday 2 May after it was targeted by the thieves in the early hours of the morning.
However, thanks to GPS trackers surreptitiously installed on the two stolen bikes, and aided by the business’s 24-hour CCTV surveillance, South Wales Police were able to rapidly locate the thieves, arresting them and charging them with burglary, along with the theft of a motor vehicle and causing criminal damage.
“The police were able to get to the badly damaged premises within four minutes of the alarm being raised,” Uprise Bikes co-founder Steve Edgell told road.cc this week.
“We have over 120 electric bikes in our showroom, and all are fitted with hidden GPS trackers which enabled us to quickly discover where the stolen bikes had been taken.”
A spokesperson for South Wales Police added: “A man and a woman from Swansea have been charged after a van was deliberately driven into a Fforestfach business premises in the early hours of Monday morning before two electric bikes were stolen.
“40-year-old Matthew Morgan, from Blaenymaes, has been charged with burglary, theft of a motor vehicle and two counts of criminal damage. 37-year-old Natalie Squibb, from Portmead, has been charged with burglary.”
However, despite the rapid police response and remarkably swift recovery of the bikes, Edgell told road.cc that the damage caused to the shop in the ram raid will prove a “costly and disruptive setback” to the company.
“The store fascia was effectively destroyed and will require a full rebuild,” he said.
“Fortunately, we have a fantastic team here at Uprise and everyone rallied to get the store cleaned up and reopened within 24 hours.
“Our customers have been great. We’ve built a healthy local and online community of fellow riders in the 12 months since we opened. Thankfully, our newly opened Uprise Service Centre in the rear unit has provided enough space and parking to continue servicing customers during repairs.”
Edgell added that repairs to the showroom, the front of which was smashed through by the van, causing damage to windows and the building’s roof, are expected to take several weeks and “cost tens of thousands of pounds”.
“It’s a costly and disruptive setback, but in the meantime, our team is working hard to ensure customers can still view and try out a great range of electric bikes and e-cargo bikes. We’re more fired up than ever,” he said.
Organised raids on bike shops like the one suffered this month by Uprise have become a concerningly frequent story on road.cc.
In April, we reported that a bike shop owner in Stockton-on-Tees whose business was targeted by a second burglary in eight months said they cannot even afford to make an insurance claim as their excess was hiked 900 per cent following the first break-in last year.
Skinnergate Cycles was ram raided at around 2am on 12 April, CCTV footage showing the business’s shutters being smashed open by someone in a vehicle before others entered the shop and made off with two bikes.
One of the two stolen e-bikes, worth over £3,000, was found by police within 45 minutes, shop owner Grant Maciver thanking Cleveland Police for their “rapid response”. However, the “scumbags” responsible also took a size medium Cube Stereo Hybrid ONE44 HPC e-bike, worth around £4,000, which has still not been recovered.
The shop was left badly damaged too, smashed glass across the floor, Grant telling us that it is the second time Skinnergate Cycles has been targeted by criminals in the past eight months. A previous break-in in broad daylight last August saw a masked gang of seven in a stolen van cut through the shutters with an angle grinder before smashing the glass.
And earlier this year a rare gold Aurum Magma was among multiple bikes stolen in the latest professional raid on Northamptonshire bike shop The Gorilla Firm, that after four “Mission Impossible-style” burglary attempts last year left police questioning if the crimes were an “inside job”.
During one successful attempt the burglars cut their way into the building’s staff toilet from below and somehow evaded the company’s motion sensor CCTV by crawling across the floor, before “clearing out” the shop’s SRAM componentry and power meters.
In September 2024, C6 Bikes in Cambridgeshire was also targeted in a break-in described as “like [the] Hatton Garden heist”, the organisation involved so sophisticated it left owner Steve Heathcock telling us, “If you told me the SAS did this, I’d believe you”.
The targeted raid saw a 10m-high roof scaled, internet wires cut, access gained by a “super precise” cut to an exterior wall, complex alarms disabled, and £200,000 of stock stolen, all without leaving a trace or any CCTV footage.
“Every single bike had gone, plus their pick of the customer bikes we had in the workshop,” Steve said. “Trek Madones, all the highest stuff. We had to replace six customer bikes, every single stock bike we had. Cannondale SuperSix Evos, Trek Domanes, Trek Madones, Orange e-bikes, Santa Cruz mountain bikes, Cannondale mountain bikes, everything.
“All the Fox clothing, helmets, all the high-end groupsets like eTap, Red eTap, all the high-end parts and accessories, they knew exactly what they were getting.
“If you told me the SAS fast-roped out a helicopter and did this, I would believe you. Because of the way they disarmed that alarm, you can’t even open the case without setting the anti-tamper trigger off.
“They knew where the anti-tamper trigger was on that case. They knew it had to peel up a specific corner. The alarm engineer said to me, ‘I don’t think I could have done this without setting it off, I don’t know how they did it’.
“There was a perfect 50cm square cut in the side of the wall. Just real precise, clean, like Ocean’s Eleven type stuff. Super neat. No mess anywhere, no destruction, just super precise. We couldn’t believe it and the insurance company couldn’t believe it.”
