It is late and the store is quiet. Inside, the manager is watching the register, the way most of us are taught to watch a store. Out on the forecourt, forty feet past the glass, a truck finishes filling its tank at pump six and pulls back onto the road. No one paid. The fuel is gone, the money never came, and the whole event happened outside the doors, in the one part of the property where nobody was looking.
Loss prevention has a habit of facing inward. The cameras that get the most attention point at the counter, the beer cave, the tobacco wall. That makes sense, because a lot of theft does happen there. But a convenience store is not only its inside. For most of them the forecourt is the larger footprint and the larger share of the business. Around eighty percent of the fuel bought in the United States is sold through convenience stores, and two kinds of loss live out there that a register will never surface: the drive off, where fuel leaves without payment, and the skimmer, where a customer's card is stolen at the pump.
The drive off, the oldest forecourt loss
The drive off is simple and old. Someone pumps gas and leaves without paying. Prepay and pay at pump cut into it hard. Research from the ASU Center for Problem Oriented Policing found that the total cost of gasoline drive offs at convenience stores fell from 300 million dollars to 89 million dollars between 2005 and 2009, as stores added better video and moved customers to paying before they pump. That is a real win, and it is part of why the problem gets less attention than it used to.
It did not go away. The same research notes that some stores still see two or three fuel thefts a week, at roughly fifty dollars each and more than a hundred dollars when the vehicle is large, and that stores in busy metro areas near highways can lose as much as fifteen hundred dollars a month. Not every site runs strict prepay. Many still let a regular start pumping before they pay, because that is the friendlier way to run a neighborhood store, and that trust is exactly where the drive off slips back in. When it happens, there is usually a camera pointed at the lane, and it captured the vehicle and the pump in full detail. The trouble is that the camera does not know a sale was owed, and the point of sale does not know fuel was dispensed to a car that never paid. The event is split across two systems that never compare notes.
The skimmer, a loss worth more than the fuel
The second forecourt loss does not take from the store's till at all. It takes from the customer, and the store pays for it later in a currency that is harder to earn back: trust. A card skimmer is a small device a criminal fits over or inside a pump's card reader to copy the card of everyone who pays there. The gas pump is a favorite target because it sits outside, often out of the clerk's line of sight, and a skimmer can read cards for days before anyone notices.
The scale is not small. Forbes, citing the FBI, reported in May 2026 that card skimming costs financial institutions and consumers more than one billion dollars each year, and that skimming compromise activity is concentrated, with seventy percent of it landing in just ten states in 2025 according to FICO. Enforcement tells the same story. Payments Dive reported that in a single year the Secret Service removed 411 illegal point of sale skimming devices and potentially prevented 428.1 million dollars in losses, after examining roughly 60,000 terminals, gas pump card readers, and ATMs, and still estimated that about one billion dollars in skimmer losses happen every year. For a store owner the direct cost is not the fuel. It is the chargebacks, the customers who learn their card was stolen at your address and do not come back, and the very real chance that a card network flags the site and pauses card acceptance until the pumps are inspected. A camera on the forecourt can see a hand lingering at a reader or a pump panel opened when no technician is scheduled. Almost nobody is watching that camera for it.
Watching the pumps, not just the registers
The fix is not another camera. It is getting the systems already on the property to compare notes about the forecourt the same way they should about the counter. ARGUS runs what we call the closed loop: it crosses the camera with the point of sale, and out here with the fuel controller, continuously, on the equipment a store already owns. A drive off becomes a simple mismatch, fuel dispensed at a pump with no matching authorized transaction, flagged with the clip and the plate attached instead of discovered days later in a fuel reconciliation. A pump panel opened outside a service window becomes its own flag, one of the earliest warnings a store can get that a skimmer may have just been installed.
Because both of these move money and risk, they land in the numbers an operator already reads. Fuel that leaves without payment shows up in the daily Revenue Integrity Score, the single figure for whether the value that left the building today was supposed to. A tampered pump shows up in Store Operating Health, so a manager sees the forecourt with the same clarity as the register. None of this asks a store to rip out hardware or replace a pump. It asks the camera, the register, and the fuel system to do together what none of them can do alone: treat the forecourt as part of the store instead of a blind spot past the glass. We are in private beta with convenience, gas station, and grocery operators. If the losses you cannot explain are happening out at the pumps, talk to us or write to business@useargus.co.
Sources
- ASU Center for Problem Oriented Policing: Gasoline Drive Offs, a Problem Oriented policing guide, reporting that drive off losses fell from 300 million dollars to 89 million dollars between 2005 and 2009, with per incident costs near fifty dollars and metro stores losing up to fifteen hundred dollars a month.
- Forbes: Card Skimming Fraud Costs More Than 1 Billion At The Gas Pump Each Year, by Kelly Phillips Erb, May 2026, citing the FBI figure of more than one billion dollars a year and FICO data on the 2025 concentration of skimming activity.
- Payments Dive: Secret Service foils card skimmers, reporting 411 skimming devices removed, 428.1 million dollars in potential losses prevented, and roughly 60,000 terminals, gas pump readers, and ATMs examined in a single year.