You may have read our recent news item about the registered business behind Beedspeed entering administration. Well, all is not quite as it seems…
Here’s how this story started
We received an email (pictured above) purporting to be from Beedspeed early yesterday morning. It was sent to our ScooterLab contact address and came from sales@beedspeed.com. The email was allegedly sent from ‘Daniel’ and contained a link to Companies House.
That link takes you to the Beedspeed BSLUK listing, which shows the company had been placed into voluntary insolvency on 15th September (Monday). I replied to the email, asking why it had been sent to us, and received an auto response from Beeedspeed, but no further details or explanation.
I was in Italy at the time, so I asked Sticky to have a look into it for me. He published a news story. Later in the day, he found that there were more than one company associated with the Beedspeed director, Daniel George. People were also letting us know that the shop in Grimsby was, in fact, open for business, as was their eBay account. Sticky updated the article for us.
Industrial sabotage?
Moving forward to this afternoon, I received a call from an understandably unhappy Daniel George, who argued that the email hadn’t come from Beedspeed. After some discussion, it seems like somebody (he has his suspicions) pretended to be Daniel and sent the email through a ScooterLab contact form using the sales@beedspeed email address. A simple yet effective way of getting damaging news like this out there into the scootering world very quickly.
This malicious act obviously had the desired effect and put us directly in the firing line.
The details of the insolvency are true. BSLUK did go into administration on Monday, but the shop and eBay accounts are indeed still trading, albeit under another company, BDS Trade Ltd.
Correction
Beedspeed posted their official response on our Facebook post this afternoon. We’ve copied it here for you to read.
From our point of view, we acted in a manner that would give fellow scooterists a heads-up. As it happens, although Daniel has closed down the BSLUK company, Beedspeed as a business is still alive and trading, albeit under the new company.
Daniel told us that suppliers/customers hadn’t lost out during the voluntary insolvency, although he admitted to owing people like utility companies, etc.
We would like to make it clear that Beedspeed are still trading (under yet another Limited company name) and apologise for giving the impression that the business had closed.
Iggy
