On April 20th, according to CCTV News, the Market Supervision Administration of Shangqiu, Henan Province, received reports from the public that they always found the amount of fuel dispensed during refueling to be less than what they purchased.
Enforcement officers from the Market Supervision Administration, in conjunction with the public security organs, immediately launched an investigation into the implicated gas stations and concluded that there was cheating software installed in their computer systems.
Preliminary analysis by the enforcement officers suggests that if the gas stations are cheating in the refueling process, they can only control the output of fuel by altering the computer program. While a thorough investigation was pending, the gas stations suddenly experienced a power outage in an attempt to erase the software data.
According to regulations, each gas station is equipped with backup power, so the likelihood of a power outage is minimal. Enforcement officers suspect that the power outage was deliberately caused.
Subsequently, the market supervision authorities sealed off the two gas stations and confiscated relevant equipment.
The statutory inspection agency has conducted an appraisal of the computer cheating systems, computer hosts, and encryption software used by two gas stations.
By reading the data stored in the computers, it was confirmed that the two gas stations engaged in metering cheating through the cheating systems, with the ability to adjust the accuracy of the fuel dispensers by 1.02%, which is more than three times the maximum allowable error of ±0.30% stipulated by the national standard for fuel dispensers.
The two implicated gas stations have been engaging in metering cheating behavior since July 2023, with illegal gains totaling nearly 96,000 yuan.
As the amount involved in the illegal activities has met the conditions for the crime of fraud, the case will be transferred to the public security authorities for further handling.
