By Ole Kröning
Did Germany’s second largest car sharing company cheat the capital out of parking fees?
Police and public prosecutors searched the headquarters, apartments and business premises of the car sharing provider MILES Mobility GmbH in Berlin on Wednesday. Investigators also confiscated evidence of a suspected million-dollar fraud from partner companies in North Rhine-Westphalia and in Austria’s capital Vienna!
“The investigations are directed against the two managing directors of the company,” said Sebastian Büchner, spokesman for the Berlin public prosecutor’s office to the BZ. “It is about suspicion of gang and commercial fraud, gang and commercial falsification of technical records and computer fraud.”
Data carriers and business documents were seized. There have been no arrests so far.
MILES Mobility is led by managers Oliver M. (35) and Eyvindur K. (43). According to its own information, the company pays between 150 and 200 euros in parking fees per week for each of its rental vehicles. These fees are paid to the districts automatically via a cell phone parking system. But according to investigators, the company is said to have saved a lot of money in the process.
The managing directors Eyvindur K. (43, left) and Oliver M. (35, middle) at a PR meeting with one of their managers Photo: Miles
The accusation: The company is said to have avoided parking fees on a large scale by using manipulated telemetry data that the vehicles parked in parking zones transmit to the responsible Berlin authorities via GPS.
The technology for such a cell phone parking system is said to have been provided by the company in North Rhine-Westphalia. The extent to which it could have been manipulated is now to be determined.
It is estimated that the state of Berlin could have lost 25 to 30 million euros in revenue due to the alleged fraud.
Employees of the responsible public order offices and the police fines office are said to have noticed significant deviations since 2019.
Miles has around 16,000 vehicles on German roads and over 2 million registered users. The company’s headquarters is a noble commercial building on the Leibniz Colonnades in Charlottenburg, which was also searched on Wednesday.
When asked by BZ, the company confirmed the raid. Spokeswoman Nora Goette: “We can confirm that a search took place on October 11, 2023, in which we cooperated fully and disclosed all requested data sets and documents to the investigating authorities.“
And further: “As this is an ongoing procedure, we cannot share any further information at the moment.“