(Yicai Global) June 18 -- Beijing's Municipal Commission of Transportation may once again penalize Hellobike after the bike-sharing operator failed to heed a regulatory warning against illegal distribution of its cycles.

The watchdog recently ordered four such companies in the city, including Hellobike operator Shanghai Junzheng Network Technology, to remove bikes that they had illegally deployed, it said in a statement yesterday. The move came as part of a campaign that has already collected more than 20,000 damaged and abandoned vehicles over the past month, it added.

The authority fined Hellobike CNY50,000 (USD7,25) last month for illegally distributing cycles and gave it 10 days to take them back. But after scanning QR codes on 45,000 shared bikes in Beijing over the past month, the commission found that 5,960 Hellobikes cycles -- 98 percent of its fleet -- were not registered with the city.

The capital and other major cities have been keeping a close eye on the bike sharing sector since it boomed several years ago and operators rolled out hundreds of thousands of cycles onto city streets only for many of them to be destroyed, dumped in rivers or parked illegally.

Operators in Beijing have over 2,000 staff and 500 vehicles managing their combined 170,000 shared cycles, according to the statement.

Editor: James Boynton