By Stephanie Schaerr
Don?t try to run off with gas from Gatenby?s Sinclair Service and Car Wash in Provo. Unlike most gas station employees, owner and 50-year veteran Bob Gatenby is not afraid to chase gas bandits with his car.
?I?ve chased them down before,? Gatenby said. ?The first thing I do is pull up behind them and take their license plate number. Then I approach them and tell them to come back and pay for it.?
Like Gatenby, many local gas station employees said they have seen huge increases in the number of people who pump and run since gas prices went up in recent months.
Gas theft is Gatenby?s biggest problem when it comes to losing money from the Sinclair he owns, and he said Provo police don?t do enough about it.
To prevent theft at most gas stations in Provo and Orem, employees are trained to take down the make, model and license plate number of each car that leaves the station without paying. After an attendant was run over while trying to stop a gas thief in Ogden last month, Provo-area employees have been trained to leave the chasing to police.
Most local gas stations said they get between two and four drive-offs each week, meaning weekly losses of up to $200. Most of these occur during the night, said Reneta Torres, an employee at the Sinclair Retail Station in Orem. For that reason, Torres said, her station requires customers to pre-pay after dark.
But gas stations are not the only places gas thieves strike. Siphoning, or using a rubber tube to suck gas from car gas tanks, has also become more common since gas prices rose to record highs. With more and more drivers wary of becoming the next victim, gas caps that lock with a key have become popular in auto parts stores.
?We get four or five people a day looking for them. Some have had their gas stolen before, and some are just trying to protect themselves,? said Nicki Forbush, an employee at Carquest Auto Parts in Provo.
Local police forces, on the other hand, said they have not received a dramatic increase in reports of gas theft. Orem Department of Public Safety Lt. Doug Edwards estimated that his department gets five or six reports of gas theft a week, which is not much more than average for any year. In Provo, police received 57 gas theft complaints between June 1 and Sept. 15 of this year, according to Dalene Higgins, a crime analyst for the Provo police department. That number is up from 48 in the same period last year.
Catching gas thieves is difficult for many reasons, Lt. Edwards said. If the gas station attendant does not record the license plate number of a drive-off, all the police can do is look for a car with a similar description in the area. And siphoners are even more difficult to track down, especially when drivers may not notice right away that gas is missing from their tanks and don?t report it.
These difficulties mean that it is often up to gas station owners to prevent theft from their stations. One solution local stations have considered is changing the payment method to force customers to pay before they pump their gas, whether they give cash to the attendant beforehand or use credit cards at the pump.
But some say that solution would insult regular customers.
?We wanted to switch, but it is kind of impolite to make them pay in advance,? said Kenneth Adams, an employee at Gas N? Go in North Provo. ?It makes people think we don?t trust them,? he said.
Gas theft is a class B misdemeanor in Utah, which is punishable by up to six months in jail and/or a $1,000 fine.