It’s hard to believe that in a few years it will be exactly a century since fuel cards debuted on the American market. Fuel cards, also called “fleet cards”, have been in use since the 1930s. Oil Company of California, now Chevron, was one of the first companies to introduce a credit card intended solely for use at gas stations, pioneering the concept of fuel cards. However, the widespread adoption and mass use of fuel cards had to wait until the 1980s, when advanced technology equipped the cards with a magnetic stripe enabling electronic transaction processing.
Fuel cards have become very popular in the transportation industry because they greatly facilitate the management of often huge fuel budgets for trucks.
Unfortunately, the criminal underworld has also become interested in this currently very popular tool. Fuel card fraud has reached unprecedented levels, and worst of all, according to all statistics, these shameful records are being broken almost every month.
Despite the introduction of appropriate tactics to block theft, the number of attempts remains extremely high. And these are not small transactions. A typical one-time fuel purchase for a trucking company usually ranges from $400 to $600. And a thief usually makes about three such transactions before the card is blocked. These are huge losses for trucking companies.
The theft scenario is very simple. Fraudsters install so-called skimmers, i.e. devices for capturing fuel card data, on card readers located on fuel pumps. The skimming device reads the data from the magnetic stripe of the fuel card, which is not encrypted, when the card is swiped. The skimmer can transmit the stolen data, or in a less advanced version, the thieves return for the skimmer filled with card numbers and relevant data later.
Then cybercriminals encode a blank card, creating an identical copy of the stolen card, and the criminal using it acts as quickly as possible to make as many illegal transactions as possible before the card is blocked.
Fortunately, there are companies that take this problem very seriously and spare no time or financial resources to solve it.
Motive is a technology company that creates hardware and software to improve the safety and productivity of physical operations. In recent days, the Motive platform has added a fuel fraud detection tool to its Motive Card fuel-card product. This new technology makes it possible to detect and stop fraud before a fraudulent purchase even occurs. Before launching the cards with the new features, Motive conducted a 30-day trial period during which it identified over 1,200 unauthorized transactions totaling over $250,000.
We recommend the website www.gomotive.com to all trucking company owners, where you can get information not only about the “secure fuel card” but also on topics related to driver safety, equipment monitoring, fleet management and company expense management. It is a highly automated platform based mainly on artificial intelligence.
Wishing you wide and safe roads from ALL ABOUT TRUCKS & TransLab! We put Truckers first!!!
