The reality of fuel theft in South Africa
A Driver was caught stealing more than R11000 in fuel within 3 weeks from a fleet vehicle.
As one of the leading fleet and fuel management systems in South Africa we have found that there are many places that are hot spots for fuel theft.
Obviously at border posts we have picked up a lot of Diesel theft. Trucks sometimes stand for days to get back into South Africa or to leave South Africa and in this period we have seen trucks almost siphoned dry. We have seen Thefts from vehicles at Mozambique Border of up to 600 liters in one go. This is a big concern for fleet owners and logistics managers because some of these vehicles are left with so little fuel they have to wait for another fleet vehicle to come and refill so that they can move. This impacts heavily on company running time and costs.
We have had clients with vehicles standing on weekends at make shift yards at projects they work on that have to spend the first few hours, when the week starts, to get fuel into their TLB’s and graders due to diesel theft over the weekend.
Here is an example of one of our latest incidents where our system is being used to get rid of drivers steeling and selling fuel from their fleet vehicles. These are reports for the Digit fleet en fuel management system, just to show you how quickly you can see a theft event.
A total of 810 liters of fuel was stolen in a period of 18 days.
This accumulates to more than R11000 in fuel.
a digit fleet and fuel monitoring system will cost you less than that.
1st Incident
As you can see in the weekly report above it shows a fuel drop of 273 liters. So on further investigation we noticed the following:
Graph of fuel for day
1. This is the time when the fuel started dropping quickly
2. This is the time where the fuel level stabilised again.
3. On the graph you can see the whole days fuel level but then the circle indicates where the fuel dropped rapidly within 14 minutes
Google map view
Here you can actually see the driver stole fuel out of the vehicle at a fuel station near Villiers
2nd Incident
Here was a second incident 11 days later at another fuel station and the amount of fuel this time was 261 liters.
Graph of fuel for day
1. This is the time when the fuel started dropping quickly
2. This is the time where the fuel level stabilised again.
3. On the graph you can see the whole days fuel level but then the circle indicates where the fuel dropped rapidly within 13 minutes
Google map view
Here you can actually see the driver stole fuel out of the fleet vehicle at a fuel station near Escort
3rd Incident
Here was a third incident one week later at the same fuel station and the amount of fuel this time was 276 liters.
Graph of fuel for day
1. This is the time when the fuel started dropping quickly
2. This is the time where the fuel level stabilised again.
3. On the graph you can see the whole days fuel level but then the circle indicates where the fuel dropped over a period of 26 minutes
the whole days fuel level but then the circle indicates where the fuel dropped rapidly within 13 minutes
Google map view
Here you can actually see the driver stole fuel out of the fleet vehicle at that same fuel station near Escort