I owe SGBike hundreds of $ after failing to park their bike properly after only a few days.
Used SGBike first time, didn’t lock properly and now have to pay $400+ fee after 5 days of not notifying me with no other warnings in the app(not until you open app to check wallet) or email notifications.
So on the weekend I went to Vivocity with my friend to hangout and we decided that we’d cycle to have a fresh take/experience of Sentosa as we’ve been there hundreds of times by walking.
My friend used Anywheel while I used SGBike and I have never used an app rental bike before so all of this was new to me, my friend was guiding me through all this with my account registration, payment and how to unlock and whatnot.
After riding around Sentosa for about an hour, getting lost and finally reaching our destination it was already fairly dark because we stared when the sun was starting to set.
We were in a rush because we saw some fireworks near the vicinity and we wanted to catch the rest of it, parked the bike to the best of my ability following the instructions on the app,set the kickstand, scanned qr code(or so i thought i did) and left.
We were actually planning on using the same bike to get back but we were gassed out so we opted to take the tram back and I thought that was the end of that.
A few days have gone by and while I was at work I received a text message notification from SGBike stating that I did not park and scan the QR code and incurred a $5 pending fee by LTA regulations.
So I was like oh no biggie(clumsy irl), made a small mistake and pay a small amount for it. But when I opened the app, to my surprise the fee was actually $400+ after 5 days.
I made an appeal in the app and sent them an email to review my situation but I was wondering if I would actually have to pay this much money for not scanning the qr code properly( i know its my fault, first time user) or i would just get banned or blacklisted or they would reduce it to a fair amount like say $50 for this mistake bcuz im only a student and $400 is a lot of money to me.
I am not saying that SGBike is at fault here, i take partial blame for my incompetence but I felt like SGBike missed out on some crucial steps for people like me to avoid doing such mistakes like:
- Pop up notifications from the app an hour later showing that I did not park it properly outside of the App
- Send an email maybe a day later explaining the same thing
- Not send a text message only 5 DAYS later waiting for it to build up to that extent
I guess now I just want to know if its still possible for SGbike to remove or reduce fee/will i have to pay the $400+ fine if my appeal rejected or can i just delete app(sounds stupid).
Any advice will help, thanks for reading this long ass post.