How to Prevent Fuel Card Misuse Before It Hurts Your Business

Fuel card fraud and misuse costs Australian businesses thousands each year. Here’s how to spot the warning signs and lock down your fleet’s fuel spend.

Fuel cards are one of the most convenient tools for managing a business fleet, but they’re also one of the easiest to exploit. Whether it’s an employee filling up the family car, buying snacks on the company dime, or something more serious like fuel reselling, misuse adds up fast.

The good news? Most fuel card misuse is preventable. We’ve seen businesses cut their losses dramatically just by tightening up a few controls and paying closer attention to the data they already have.

How Common Is Fuel Card Misuse?

According to a ‘Fraud Matters’ global study conducted by Shell, as many as 93% of fleet managers believe that some drivers are involved in fraudulent activity.

The tricky part is that most misuse isn’t obvious at the start. It’s not someone draining thousands in a single hit, but it’s the slow leak of small, hard-to-spot transactions that add up over time. A tank filled on a day off here, a few grocery items there, some cigarettes there or an extra jerry can that never makes it to the worksite.

Left unchecked, it becomes normalised. And once employees see that nobody’s watching, the problem tends to grow.

The Most Common Types of Fuel Card Misuse

Before you can stop misuse, you need to know what you’re looking for. These are the patterns we hear about the most often from fleet managers:

• Personal vehicle fill-ups — The classic. An employee uses the company fuel card to fill their personal car, partner’s car, or a mate’s vehicle. It’s often rationalised as a “perk” of the job, but it’s theft.
• Fuel purchases on non-work days — Transactions that happen on weekends, public holidays, or outside normal working hours when the vehicle shouldn’t be in use.
• Unusual locations — Fuel purchases far from job sites, usual routes, or the employee’s home-to-work corridor. A servo 50km in the wrong direction is a red flag.
• Non-fuel purchases — Depending on your card settings, employees might be buying snacks, drinks, cigarettes, car washes, or other items that have nothing to do with work.
• Fuel quantity mismatches — A vehicle with a 60-litre tank showing a 75-litre fill. Either someone’s filling jerry cans, or the fuel isn’t going into the work vehicle at all.
• Frequency anomalies — A vehicle that normally fills up twice a week suddenly filling up daily, or multiple transactions on the same day at different locations.
• Fuel reselling — At the more serious end, some employees fill jerry cans or tanks and sell the fuel privately for cash. This is harder to detect but shows up as unusually high consumption relative to kilometres travelled.

The Best Fuel Card to Prevent Misuse

The best time to prevent fuel card misuse is before it happens. Most modern fuel cards like Shell Card, WEX Motorpass, FleetCard and others offer controls that can shut down common abuse patterns. The problem is that many businesses never turn them on.

Here’s what we recommend setting up from day one:

• Restrict product types — If your drivers only need fuel, lock the card to fuel-only purchases. There’s no reason for most fleet cards to allow snacks, drinks, or shop items. Most providers let you restrict by product category.
• Set transaction limits — Cap the maximum dollar amount per transaction based on your largest vehicle’s tank size. If your biggest vehicle holds 80 litres, there’s no reason to allow $300 transactions.
• Limit daily or weekly spend — Set a ceiling on how much can be spent per card in a given period. This prevents runaway misuse even if individual transactions look normal.
• Restrict purchase times — If your team only works Monday to Friday, consider blocking weekend transactions. Same goes for overnight hours if nobody should be refuelling at 2am.
• Require odometer entry — Many fuel cards can require drivers to enter the vehicle’s odometer reading at the pump. This creates a data trail that makes it much easier to spot consumption anomalies.
• Match cards to vehicles — Where possible, assign each card to a specific vehicle rather than a driver. This makes it easier to track consumption patterns and spot when fuel isn’t going where it should.
• Enable PIN protection — A basic step, but a card with a PIN is harder to lend to a mate or use if lost or stolen.
• Enable smart alerts — Set up automatic notifications when transactions exceed thresholds, happen at unusual times, or occur outside expected locations. Some providers do this better than others – Shell Card, for example, offers real-time email alerts that flag suspicious activity as it happens, so you’re not waiting until month-end to spot a problem.

Monitoring: What to Watch For

Controls only work if someone’s actually watching. If your current fuel card doesn’t allow you to set limits or receive alerts in real time, we recommend building a simple monthly review into your routine.

• Compare fuel spend to kilometres travelled — This is your single most powerful tool. If a vehicle is using significantly more fuel per 100km than expected for its type, something’s off. Most fleet management systems can calculate this automatically if you’re capturing odometer data.
• Look for patterns in timing and location — Run a report showing transaction times and locations. Weekend fills, late-night purchases, or transactions far from usual routes should trigger a closer look.
• Watch for round-number transactions — Employees filling personal vehicles often pump a round dollar amount ($50, $100) rather than filling to full. A pattern of round-number transactions can be a tell.
• Check for multiple same-day transactions — Unless a vehicle is doing serious kilometres, there’s rarely a legitimate reason to fill up twice in one day.
• Review non-fuel purchases — If your cards allow shop items, run a report on what’s actually being bought. You might be surprised.
• Benchmark vehicles against each other — If you have multiple vehicles of the same type doing similar work, compare their fuel consumption. An outlier might indicate misuse—or a maintenance issue worth catching early.

Creating a Fuel Card Policy That Employees Stick To

A written fuel card policy does two things: it sets clear expectations upfront, and it gives you something to point to if things go wrong.

What to include:

• What the card can and can’t be used for (fuel only, or fuel plus specific items)
• Which vehicles or purposes are covered
• Whether personal use is ever permitted (hint: it shouldn’t be)
• Requirements like entering odometer readings or keeping receipts
• Who to contact if the card is lost, stolen, or declined
• Consequences for misuse

Make sure every driver signs it. Keep a copy on file. Review it annually and update it if your policies change.

The Tech That Makes This Easier

If you’re managing more than a handful of vehicles, the right tools can automate most of the heavy lifting:

Fuel card provider portals — Most providers offer online dashboards with transaction reporting, alerts, and spend analysis. The quality varies though. Shell Card’s online portal is one of the better ones we’ve used, with real-time transaction visibility, customisable alerts, and reporting that’s intuitive. Set up email alerts for transactions that exceed thresholds or happen outside approved times.

Telematics and GPS tracking — If you’re running GPS in your vehicles, you can cross-reference fuel transactions against actual vehicle location. A fill-up that happens where the vehicle wasn’t is an obvious red flag.

Fleet management software — Platforms that integrate fuel card data with odometer readings, job tracking, and vehicle maintenance give you a complete picture. They can flag anomalies automatically rather than waiting for you to spot them manually.

The Bottom Line

Fuel card misuse rarely starts as malicious fraud. More often, it’s small liberties that grow over time because nobody’s paying attention. The solution isn’t to treat your team like criminals but to clear expectations, use the controls your fuel card already offers, and review the data regularly. Most employees will never misuse a fuel card. But the ones who might are far less likely to try if they know someone’s watching. Get your controls right, check the numbers monthly, and you’ll catch problems early (or prevent them entirely).