It started off as a joke. Pranksters across Delhi found they could walk up to a moving e-rickshaw, open an app on their phone, connect to its battery over Bluetooth, and switch it off cold, right in the middle of traffic. The driver, with no idea what had hit him, would be left stranded while the prankster filmed his confusion for social media.
The trend, nicknamed “tirri control,” spread fast across Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and X over the past week. This week, the government stepped in and pulled the apps behind it.
The app at the centre of it, BAT-BMS, is a legitimate battery-monitoring tool made by China’s Shenzhen Grenergy Technology, built to track things like charge level, voltage and battery health on Bluetooth-enabled lithium packs.
The trouble is that many budget e-rickshaws in India run on cheap, Chinese-made battery units whose Bluetooth is left wide open, no password, no authentication. Anyone within 10 to 15 metres could connect and trigger the battery’s “discharge switch,” cutting power to the motor instantly, sometimes while the vehicle was still moving with passengers aboard.
For the pranksters, it made for good content. For the drivers, it meant real money lost. Several were filmed stranded in traffic, paying strangers Rs 100 to Rs 200 just to get their batteries switched back on.
One elderly driver was filmed pushing his e-rickshaw roughly three kilometres after it died on him mid-route. Not every e-rickshaw was at risk, vehicles running on older lead-acid batteries have no Bluetooth at all, and some lithium models use systems that BAT-BMS can’t connect to.
As the videos spread and criticism mounted, Delhi Transport Minister Pankaj Singh said the government was aware of the trend and looking into it, adding that switching off someone’s vehicle without consent is illegal and police were expected to act on their own against those responsible.
The Transport Department opened an investigation into BAT-BMS and a second app, Epoch Li-ion, found to work the same way. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology separately began examining the app’s security and its compliance with Indian rules. In Madhya Pradesh, police in Ujjain detained a suspect for allegedly using BAT-BMS to disable e-rickshaws and posting the videos online.
Both BAT-BMS and Epoch Li-ion have now been taken down amid the crackdown, the first concrete action against the trend. BAT-BMS had already vanished from Apple’s App Store earlier in the row; its removal from Google Play, where it had racked up over 100,000 downloads, is new.
Experts are cautioning against declaring victory too soon. The fault was never really in the app; it’s in the unsecured battery hardware sitting on thousands of e-rickshaws across the country.
Any similarly built battery-monitoring app could exploit the same gap, and cybersecurity professionals point out that AI-based app-building tools now let anyone recreate this kind of Bluetooth control feature in minutes and sideload it onto a phone, no app store required.
Sandeep K Shukla, director of IIIT-Hyderabad, called it a symptom of a wider regulatory vacuum around cybersecurity for connected devices entering India, one that isn’t unique to Chinese imports.
This post was last modified on July 3, 2026 2:00 pm