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RETAIL BY KEITHREID Stealing fuel at the pump THE CHANGING FACE OF FUEL THEFT – PART 2 This is the second of a two-part article taking a look at the issue of sophisticated fuel theft for both card lock and retail operators. This article focuses on some experiences in the retail sector. F UEL THEFT AT RETAIL SITES IS HARDLY ANYTHING new. Perhaps the most common area of concern is the traditional drive off where the customer fills the tank then drives away without paying. This is a continual concern for the industry but one, of course, that ramps up as the economy declines and/or fuel prices increase. These same factors put added pressure on thieves to get away with even larger volumes of fuel not just for personal use but for sale to others. In Part 1 of this article, we took a look at some of the extraordinary measures modern thieves are using in order to steal large amounts of fuel at card lock sites. Brian Decker, card lock and retail operations manager for El Monte, Calif.- based DeWitt Petroleum was a valuable source of informa- tion for that topic. During the course of our interviews, he similarly described some of the extraordinary efforts thieves had undertaken at some of his company's retail sites. The thieves committing this type of crime are typically seen as having a background in the industry where they would be familiar with the technology and how to manipu- late it to their advantage. With the dispenser, the typical goal is to compromise the pulser in order to allow them to pump out a high volume of fuel while only appearing to have pumped a handful of gallons. A SHOWER OF SPARKS "One day, one of our maintenance people reported that one of the panels was taken off the front of a dispenser," said Decker. "We couldn't figure it out. Dispensers are manufactured in such a way that they are not that secure. Or they are made with locks that have the same key or, depending on the manufacturer; you could just wiggle the panels and remove them. So we thought maybe it just fell off." That was proven not to be the case when another dis- penser panel was off the next day. A bit of investigative work found the plastic box that holds the pulser had clearly been removed. "We found that somebody had been removing the pulser gears then authorizing and filling up and controlling 22 SEPTEMBER 2012 the pulser by hand instead of with the meter," said Decker. "They would go in and say, 'Give me $20 on No. 3,' then they would go out and pump $800 worth of fuel and they would go back inside, and it only showed $2 and they would get their change. So we had to devise a way to not only keep them out of the pulser box, but out of the dispenser itself. We started looking at things from the perspective that what- ever we do, it would have to be practically overkill because thieves were going to such great extents." After considerable research and trial and error, Decker substituted tough, round vending machine locks for the standard dispenser locks. But even then, the company has video of a thief using a grinder at the pump to cut off the lock in broad daylight. "Sparks were flying everywhere and nobody said a word," he said. Decker began looking to provide a second line of defense inside the cabinet by fabricating steel cages around the puls- er itself. "Everything seemed to be going well. We ordered new locks for every dispenser and swapped them all out only to find out the thieves had discovered a new way," Decker said. "We started finding the top panels open on dispens- ers, and we thought maybe they had popped open because they're plastic and don't secure very well. So we opened it up and could not see that anything was messed with, and locked it back up. The next day we found another one open so we immediately knew something was going on." To address this still undefined threat, Decker took sheet metal and screwed it down around anything that was obvi- ously accessible from the panel. "The next day we found another open cabinet and the sheet metal had been cut off with shears," Decker said. Although DeWitt ended up losing some fuel, the criminal cut himself on the sheet metal and a bloody fingerprint indicated the new line of attack. The thieves were accessing the pulser from the top of the cabinet by removing the connector and then plugging in their own pulser. In response, Decker changed out all of the top panel locks to have individual keys. He also added a dispenser shutdown switch on the panels so that if anything opened, NPN Magazine n www.npnweb.com OPERATIONS