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A recent sentencing of a UK man who defrauded his employers of 21000 pounds by using the company fuel cards fraudulently has rubbed the entire fuelcard industry in a wrong way. To give you a background of the case, this person actually stole the fuel card that was used to pay for the petrol for his company.

Since the employers did not realize the theft or they forgot to get the card de-activated in time, the 31 year old man, Wayne Mitchell used it to buy fuel worth 5,000 pounds for himself before lending it to his friends who used the card to add to the misery of the company. The card was used between 21st July 2008 to 24th December 2008 at multiple petrol stations. During these 5 months, the employer lost out on 21,000 pounds of fuel. You may be left wondering as to how could this employer let the fuel card be abused for 5 months and not notice it.

The accused admitted to his fraud in an early hearing and was given a 2 year prison sentence and suspended for 2 years. He was also told to work for 150 hours without pay at the Oxford Crown Court. And in the recent Court order, he was ordered to pay 5 pounds as a nominal charge for the fraud committed by him. Interestingly, the Court did not consider the full amount of 21,000 pounds before sentencing the man and instead it took into account the actual fraud of 4985 pounds that was committed by the person.

Needless to say, the fuel card fraternity says that the blame lies with the company in question because it chose to ignore fraudulent purchases over a period of 5 months. One of the fuel card company’s representatives told us that these days petrol and diesel cards come with zero-liability insurance and this is more than sufficient to guard against any liability arising out of stolen cards. All that a person needs to do is to call the customer support and get this card blocked and within 24 hours of the call the petrol or diesel card gets blocked.

This episode also raises some very important questions.

1. How could the company have prevented the fraud?
2. How could a company limit the extent of liability arising out of criminal use of petrol cards?
3. And what would be the liability of a fraudster who chooses to sell a stolen card in grey market?

The Court sentencing is going to raise a few questions on what can be done better to ensure that this sort of theft does not take place in future, or at the least how can a company protect its petrol cards from potential frauds.