EXCLUSIVE How YOU could find yourself wrongly accused of 'pump and dash' and hit with a £60 fine - as alleged petrol thefts hit all-time high
Petrol thefts have soared to an all-time high, figures suggest.
MailOnline can reveal that 110,000 charges for alleged 'pump and dash' thefts were issued by two major fuel security firms last year.
This marks a 20-fold rise in just six years.
Industry bigwigs insist there has been genuine increase in drivers fleeing forecourts without paying, or 'bilking', especially in the wake of the cost of living crisis.
Yet drivers say they have been incorrectly stung with threatening letters demanding hefty 'admin fees' on top of their supposedly unpaid petrol or diesel.
In an attempt to recoup the costs of stolen fuel for petrol stations, many of which are independently owned, Forecourt Eye and British Oil Security Syndicate (BOSS) scan forecourts with numberplate-recognition technology.
The two companies work with hundreds of filling sites and are considered among the biggest in the sector.
Between the duo, they fired off nearly 113,000 requests to the DVLA for driver details last year.
This is up from around 5,500 in 2018, according to data MailOnline obtained from the DVLA through Freedom of Information.
Firms only request such data, which costs £2.50 a time and includes the car owner's name and address, if they intend to recover costs for non-payment of fuel.
As well as seeking to recuperate the alleged unpaid fuel, companies may slap on their own admin fees. Forecourt Eye bolts on a £60 add-on.
Drivers may feel pressured into paying up, even if they already forked out at the time.
Some claim to have been threatened with being banned from forecourts up and down the country.
There are several ways motorists can wrongly be accused of a 'pump and dash'.
For example, if your card was declined and neither you nor the cashier noticed before you drove off, you are likely to be sent a demand.
If a criminal has cloned your plates and genuinely steals petrol, you could also be on the hook for any fuel they have stolen.
Criminal gangs have also been known to use entirely fake plates to dodge paying for fuel.
Drivers also risk being falsely accused of bilking if a cashier selected the wrong pump (or failed to select one at all) when totting up your bill. If this happened, it would mean your fuel was technically never paid for, even if you paid for someone else's.
This is the equivalent of a supermarket cashier failing to scan an item at checkout.
Chris Mullen, for example, was accused of not paying £7.80 for petrol – even though he was driving a diesel car and filled up £30 worth of fuel.
Despite fighting the claim from Forecourt Eye, thought to be caused by staff error, the 63-year-old from Stalham, Norfolk, said the firm 'insisted this was the case'.
He was slapped with a £60 admin charge on top of the petrol he allegedly owed.
After appealing, Tesco did issue a refund and an apology to him as well as a £10 gift card, which the motorist branded 'something of an insult'.
Tesco told the Great Yarmouth Mercury that its processes were 'regularly reviewed' with regular meetings and new staff training to 'prevent errors from occurring'.
Social media and forums are littered with similar stories of motorists claiming to have been falsely accused of driving off without paying.
MailOnline's analysis can't prove genuine thefts have risen, it only shows that reports have gone up.
Police data, however, suggests more than 27,000 alleged thefts occurred last year, in line with levels in 2020.
About 95 per cent of cases are canned with no suspect being identified.
Cops themselves moan they have 'finite resources' to probe suspected thefts.
The Petrol Retailers Association, whose members run two-thirds of forecourts, says bilking robs them of around £100million a year.
Petrol stations themselves have resorted to shaming 'pump and dashers' online in a bid to claw back the stolen fuel.
One forecourt in Hythe, Kent, last summer shared CCTV footage of a blue car filling up with £120 of petrol before the driver got straight back into his vehicle and casually zoomed off without attempting to pay.
Owner Sutha Hari, 49, claimed she wasn't going to bother alerting the police because 'nothing ever comes of it'.
While there is no specific offence code for robbing from fuel pumps, it falls under the 'making off without payment' umbrella.
It also covers restaurant 'dine and dashers', as well as people who make off without paying taxi drivers at the end of journeys. Thieves can be jailed for up to two years.
Experts say petrol theft pushes up prices for law-abiding motorists.
Steve Gooding, director of the RAC Foundation, said: 'It would be tempting to suspect that the cost-of-living crisis is pushing normally law-abiding people into committing this type of offence, but that would be an insult to the vast majority of people who continue to obey the law whatever their circumstances.
'Repeat criminals might well be pushing their luck more than ever because they believe other pressures on the police are such that they'll get away with it.
'Drive-offs might be seen as relatively low-level crimes in the grand scheme of things but they are corrosive to society, damaging to businesses and ultimately push up pump prices for law-abiding motorists and riders.
'More is being done to prevent these crimes through adoption of better surveillance systems and pay-at-pump options, but the numbers suggest the problem has been getting worse, with tens of thousands of drive-away fuel thefts each year.
'Those tempted to refuel without paying need to feel there is a real threat of being caught and punished.'
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