Scooter company Bird is emailing customers to tell them they still owe 62 cents, 93 cents, or 78 cents from rides taken years ago

Struggling Bird is coming after customers who owe just cents. Bird

• Scooter company Bird is reaching out to customers to settle past-due amounts of cents.
• In November, Bird admitted to inflating its revenue for a period between 2020 and 2022.
• The company is seeking additional funding following a dismal Q3 earnings report. 

Electric bike and scooter company Bird is desperate for pennies. 

The company has begun emailing past customers with requests to settle up old dues, according to tweets that journalist Ali Griswold compiled on her Substack. 

But several of the collection requests are for a matter of cents. 

"Please tell me why BIRD Scooters decides to follow up and remind me I owe them $0.62," one customer tweeted after receiving an email from the company on December 7th. "Y'all must be strapped for cash rn," the customer wrote. 

—dr divine•mandi (@mzisawesome) December 7, 2022

Bird's frantic bid for funds follows a tumultuous few months for the company. 

In November, the company admitted in a press release that it had been inflating revenue for the past couple of years. 

Bird allows customers to take rides by loading credits onto their customer accounts — similar to how public metros allow riders to fill up metrocards. Yet even when the credits expired, Bird allowed riders to continue using its services. It counted the full value of those rides in its revenue, even though it now acknowledges that "collectability was not probable."

That accounting error resulted in a revenue overstatement of $31.6 million over an almost two-year period between 2020 and 2022.

Bird, which benefited from the micro mobility boom in Silicon Valley and was once valued at $2.85 billion, is now struggling to stay afloat. 

In its third-quarter earnings report, the company announced that it only had $38.5 million in unrestricted cash and cash equivalents as of September 30 this year, which may explain its dogged attempts to collect dues of late. 

Bird said that amount would "not be sufficient to meet the Company's obligations within the next twelve months" if it couldn't secure more funding. Without additional capital, the company noted that it would need to scale back certain parts or all of its operations or even seek bankruptcy protection. 

Bird didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.