CARD LOSSES
Page 40
Page 41
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
Since 19891 have used BP Oil UK agency cards for both my businesses. We have happily paid a fairly high price for our fuel, partly because the systems BP uses seem secure.
At the end of last year we had a driver with a drink problem. Having dismissed him, we requested the return of his agency card—a card with a bold registration number printed on the reverse. Unknown to me, it was never returned. Our systems failed to pick up on this loss of control.
We employ a part-time bookkeeper and, to my horror, some weeks passed before we realised invoices were showing up to 12 fraudulent transactions a day for all types of fuel, obtained from the same garage! These multi-hits proved to me that the cashiers never bother checking the card details: they just swipe the cards. it seems they don't even notice the same card being used over and over again on the same day.
The amount of money involved is more than £6,000. The police attitude is breathtaking—they want me to prove it was my driver (he says he lost the card).
We have now issued each driver with a card embossed with his name. They are signed. But we seem to Still be responsible for the card, whatever the circumstances of its use, even if the user isn't the one named on the card, nor has a matching signature!
You can appreciate that, like everyone else, we are suffering from the high cost of fuel, ferries, etc. I am not ashamed to say this has left me feeling broken. You work hard, you struggle and fight, and what for? To see foreign operators take your work, charging below your cost!
You see protesters hauled before the courts, punished unfairly, while the lawyers get fat on the legal niceties and the big hauliers keep their heads in the sand. I despair of the industry I love, but I am enclosing £500 to be used in the suggested fighting fund. Somehow it occurs to me that I might just know a tiny bit how the miners felt.
Holmes of Heathrow, Middlesex.