Beware the gas station attendant

Only a personal gas station can guarantee “safe” gasoline for the driver.

At least every fourth gas station in the Moscow region poses a serious threat either to the car or to the wallet of its owner. Such preliminary conclusions were made by employees of the Main Directorate for Economic Crimes of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation as part of the large-scale operation currently underway in Russia to inspect gas stations. As investigators found out, with the help of a variety of schemes and devices, station operators can easily underfill 2-3 liters from every 10 liters of gasoline sold, or even even fill the tanks with fuel that is harmful both to the car itself and to those in it. people.

As the GUBEP noted, they conduct mass inspections of gas stations every spring and summer. This time the operation began on February 24 and will end in July. According to the operatives, the first thing they did was go to those gas stations that had long caused complaints. Thus, in Moscow, the activities of 15% of suspicious gas stations were studied, and violations were detected at every fourth. In the Moscow region, the number of petrol violators is even greater. Of the 20% of gas stations inspected, every third one had complaints. As a result, several hundred criminal and administrative cases have already been opened.

As noted by the GUBEP, gas station representatives show the greatest ingenuity when motorists are underfilled with fuel. So, at stations with old, still mechanical, filling equipment, operators discovered that each column has a special spring - if it is stretched too much, then less gasoline will flow into the tank, but this does not affect the meter readings. At new, computerized gas stations, scammers work in a new way. They simply insert a special microchip into the column, thanks to which the client can fill only 7-8 liters of gasoline instead of the 10 liters counted by the meter. According to the police, these chips are now being widely sold on radio-electronic markets, and their price ranges from 100 to 200 dollars. Their gas station representatives usually pay for themselves within a day of work. So, in the quiet suburb of Stupino, at one gas station they managed to deceive motorists, according to the most conservative estimates of detectives, of two tons of gasoline daily.

Another method of deception practiced at gas stations is to artificially inflate the octane number of gasoline, and, consequently, its brand and price. Some stations, according to representatives of the GUBEP, use a simple method for this - they simply add ordinary naphthalene to the fuel. However, this method is considered outdated, and the most common cases are when gas station representatives increase the octane number of gasoline using special additives. Such fuel harms not only the car itself, but also its owner, since it emits a very large amount of lead.

During the inspection, the police encountered numerous cases of the sale of openly counterfeit fuel, which cannot even be called gasoline. Moreover, for its production, as noted in the GUBEP, fraudsters are increasingly using the territories of military units. To do this, it is enough that it be located near the railway, have capacities from 80 to 120 tons for storing petroleum products and, of course, an accommodating unit commander. Then the scammers buy cheap straight-run gasoline (it is used in the chemical industry and, by the way, is not subject to excise taxes) and, using simple technology, make it look like AI-92, 95, etc. gasoline. It is quite difficult to detect such underground workshops, since the police do not have the right to work on the territory of a military unit. Last year, the GUBEP identified two such units, and several more came to the attention of detectives this spring.

Alexander SHVAREV