Fuel-card fraud and skimming: why trucking is so exposed and how to cut the leak

Fuel is one of your largest line items, and the cards your drivers use to buy it are one of your most attacked. Fuel-card fraud rarely announces itself with a single dramatic loss. Instead it shows up as a steady, low-level leak that blends into a high fuel bill, which is exactly what makes it hard to spot and easy to ignore until the numbers no longer add up.

Trucking is more exposed to this than most sectors, for reasons baked into how road freight actually refuels. This guide explains why that exposure exists, the fraud patterns that recur across fleets, and the concrete controls that cut the leak. It is general information for transport operators, not financial advice.

How big the leak can be

It helps to anchor the problem with some figures, while being honest that they are illustrative rather than hard industry statistics. One operator reported routine fuel-card losses of around $4,000 to $5,000 a month, spiking to $15,000 to $20,000 in bad months. That is a single carrier's account of its own experience, not a sector average, but it shows how quickly a leak can scale once cards are loosely controlled.

Separately, a survey run by a fleet-technology vendor suggested that roughly half of the fleets it asked estimated fraud at about five per cent of their fuel spend. Treat that with the caution any vendor-run survey deserves: the sample is self-selecting and the vendor sells a fix. Still, even a fraction of that figure, applied to a large annual fuel bill, is real money walking out of the business every month.

The takeaway is not a precise percentage. It is that fraud on fuel cards is common enough, and large enough, to be worth designing against rather than treating as an occasional accident.

Why trucking is especially exposed

The structural reason is the pump itself. Many truck-fuelling locations and truck-stop pumps still accept unencrypted magnetic-stripe cards rather than chip and PIN. A magnetic stripe is trivial to clone, so an unattended pump that reads one is a natural home for a skimming device. The fuel networks that serve heavy goods vehicles have been slower to move to chip and EMV at the pump than ordinary forecourts, which leaves a long tail of vulnerable terminals on exactly the routes your drivers use.

Layer the operating model on top of that. Cards are used unattended, often at night, far from any supervisor. They may be shared between drivers or left with a vehicle rather than a person. And many fleets run cards with no transaction-level controls at all, so a card that works for legitimate fuel will work just as well for anything else. Each of those is a small crack; together they make trucking a soft target.

The common fraud patterns

The patterns repeat across fleets. Pump skimming reads the magnetic stripe at the point of sale and clones the card, which is then used elsewhere, sometimes far from your lanes. Off-fleet fuelling is a driver or a third party buying fuel for a vehicle that is not yours, on your card. Over-fuelling and reselling sees more fuel drawn than the tank holds, with the surplus siphoned and sold on. And non-fuel purchases use a card meant for diesel to buy food, goods or other items at the same site.

What these have in common is that none of them looks abnormal on a fuel statement at first glance. A skimmed clone shows up as a fuel-type transaction. An off-fleet fill looks like a fill. The fraud hides inside the very category the card exists to pay for, which is why catching it depends on controls and visibility rather than on the line item alone.

The controls that cut the leak

You cannot fix the pumps, but you can shrink the blast radius of every card. The defences that consistently help are straightforward. Set a sensible per-card limit sized to a realistic refuel, so a cloned or misused card cannot drain a large balance in one go. Restrict each card to relevant merchant categories, typically fuel and closely related spend, so a card used off-network is simply declined. Require a driver PIN or ID at the pump so a lost or skimmed card alone is not enough. Turn on real-time transaction alerts so an odd purchase reaches you in minutes rather than at month end. And review anomalies promptly, because the patterns above are far easier to stop on day one than on day thirty.

Putting these in place across dozens or hundreds of driver cards is its own operational challenge, which we cover in our guide on fleet-card spend controls. If your drivers refuel across borders, the currency side of paying for fuel and tolls is worth reading alongside this in cross-border tolls versus fuel costs.

How Altery fits

Altery is not a fuel-card network and not a bank, and it does not make fraud impossible. What it gives you is a way to design the controls above into the cards themselves. Altery issues virtual and physical business cards with per-card spend limits, so each card carries only as much exposure as a driver actually needs, and a misused card hits a ceiling fast rather than running freely.

Those cards also carry merchant and category controls, so you can lock a card to the kinds of spend it is meant for and have off-network purchases declined automatically. Real-time balances and alerts mean an unusual transaction surfaces while you can still act on it, instead of weeks later on a statement. Because cards can be issued and frozen on demand, a card that looks compromised can be killed instantly and replaced without disrupting the rest of the fleet.

None of this removes the need for good habits at the pump, and Altery does not insure you against loss. It simply caps how much any single card can leak and shortens the time it takes you to notice. This is general information, not financial advice.

Frequently asked questions