The most common Petrol Bunk fraud

When I think about the frauds I’ve personally faced, particularly down south here in Chennai, two bunch of frauds top the ranking chart. Number one is, obviously, the auto-wallah frauds. I don’t have a count of the different types of frauds they do, but they keep reinventing and coming up with a newer fraud like twice every week. They come up negotiation fraud, meter fraud, distance fraud, route fraud, one-way fraud, traffic-jam fraud, and innumerable combinations of these. And there’s only one real way to avoid getting into this fraud – not choosing autos as a mode of transport, which is what I recommend to most people permanently stationed in Chennai.

There’s another type of common fraud that I’m witnessing these days in the petrol bunks. The first time I was caught off-guard was 6 months back. I had asked the bunk guy to load Rs. 500 worth of petrol. He showed me the ‘Zero’ reading initially and started loading petrol, and suddenly stopped when the reading showed Rs. 100. This is the point to watch out. When you tell them you had asked for Rs. 500 worth of petrol and not for Rs. 100, they pretend as though they didn’t hear it properly the first time. They then reset the meter (but the reading never really goes back to zero, and they don’t ask you to watch the reading this time) and start loading till Rs. 400 and stop there. Since the reset from 100 to zero never happened and yet they stop at 400, you easily lose Rs. 100 in the process - especially if you did not notice the reading properly before the second phase of the loading. Even if you had noticed, the bunk guy is going to insist that the meter was reset before loading the additional Rs. 400. I have also noticed that they sometimes press the so-called ‘reset’ switch, but the reading does not go back to zero.

I became very conscious of this fraud after my first incident where I think (I still am not sure) I lost Rs. 100. The same fraud was tried twice on me after that, one as recently as the day before yesterday. This time, it was the Indian Oil bunk near the Kodambakkam Flyover in Chennai. Fortunately, I noticed that the meter reading did not go back to zero after the fraud ‘reset’ and shouted at him. They do not play with you if you consciously watch the reading throughout. They only play with you when you lose a moment of concentration and fail to watch the reading go back to zero during the mid-way reset. If you think you’ve been fooled into this, the best way to tackle this fraud is to ask them to show the petrol dispensing report from the machine – the log that contains all the dispensing activity for the day, which contains the time and quantity of petrol dispensed. I haven’t seen one personally, but I’ve been told that such a report can indeed be generated. You could also threaten to call the police as you go through the log with them, just to be on the safer side. In my experience, just raising the voice and being stern works most of the time.

This fraud is very difficult to control/eliminate because, unlike problems such as adulteration or fault meters, this can never really be tested and isolated. And the bunk owners can not be penalized since it’s the bunk operator who indulges in this. The only way to tackle this seems to be to consciously watch out for these frauds.