Do People Steal Gas....

We heard on the new tonight that people are punching holes in the bottom of gas tanks on cars and draining the gas out into containers to steal it - I guess a locking gas cap wouldn't do much good. It would think it would be a little dangerous though! The also said that people are stealing other's license plates, putting them on their cars and then going to fill up their cars - they then drive off without paying, but they can't be traced because they have someone else's license plate.

It is, you're just not seeing it around you. We were in our college town walking through the parking lot of a McDonalds that was across from our appartment building(we have to walk through that parking lot to go across the street to our cafe for college meals) and one of the McDonald's workers had had her gas siphoned right out of her tank! And the vehicle had been sitting within her view.

I rarely have vehicles that are very new but one or two of them had a lever on the inside that needed to be pulled before you could open the gas cap door. My guess would be that more newer cars have features like that so it's harder to steal gas than it used to be. We have heard of it happening though. Actually there was a really interesting one on the news tonight...a pick up truck pulling an enclosed trailer would pull into the parking lot of a gas station. They would park over the diesel tanks, which commonly are out of the way and in a normal location for a long vehicle to park. But, the people had trap doors in the floor of the trailer and they'd use them to access the caps on the diesel tanks...then they'd siphon the diesel from there into tanks in the trailer. The gas stations would have had no idea what had happened until they checked the tank levels with the sale records which usually doesn't happen til closing time. I have had gas stolen...sort of...a family member was down on his luck, out of work and staying in a camper up here. We never actually caught him stealing the gas...well he told us he did the one time...well, starting at the beginning, my vehicle kept running out of gas (gauge didn't work so I'd just calculate my mileage based on how much gas I pumped), s/o thought I must be running extra places when I'd borrow his because his was constantly lower than it should have been...I was getting upset because I knew I was putting gas in mine and I wasn't driving his anywhere extra. Well towards the end of the reletive's stay s/o discovered he was missing a full tank of racing fuel from his race car...he justifiable had a fit (that stuff cost $5 a gallon then which was a lot 2 years ago) and the reletive was here at the time and admitted he siphoned it out, out of desperation. After that we kind of put it together that he'd been siphoning it out of our vehicles all along.