Tasi Malala was driving with his girlfriend to grab some breakfast outside Scottsdale, Arizona, last month when he noticed that his Toyota pickup was very low on gas and quickly getting lower. He pulled into a station and started to fill up with premium. That’s when he spotted the leak.
“I looked under my truck, and it’s literally gas just pouring out the bottom,” said Malala, 31. “It’s pouring out like crazy. I was freaking out.”
It turned out he had been a target of a newly popular way to steal gas: just drilling a hole. All the thief would have required was a few minutes alone with a handheld electric drill and a gas can — or even some milk jugs. Malala was left with a perfectly round hole in his tank and a nearly $3,000 repair bill. His truck was in the shop for about a week.
This sort of drilling-and-draining thievery appears to be increasingly common as the war with Iran has pushed gasoline prices to their highest level in four years, and as older — and less-destructive — methods of stealing fuel have gotten harder to pull off.
In Los Angeles, where gas prices are among the nation’s highest at about $6 a gallon for regular, service adviser Lupes Armas said his repair shop is fixing a drilled-out gas tank about once a week these days. It used to be a couple times a year at most.
“It’s definitely a problem,” Armas said.
Insurers are starting to see more damage claims, too, although at this point, just weeks into the war and spiking gas prices, the reports are mostly anecdotal, according to the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies. It will take time to see how bad it gets.
“Let’s hope this is a short-lived phenomena,” said Brett Odom, policy vice president at the insurance group.
The repairs are covered by comprehensive auto policies, experts say.
The drilled-out gas tanks are similar to the occasional waves of stolen catalytic converters, which can be removed from vehicles with a power saw and then sold for the precious metals inside, said Bob Passmore, vice president of personal lines for the American Property Casualty Insurance Association.
That, too, is an expensive repair.
The shift to drilling holes in fuel tanks comes as an old method of stealing gas has faded: siphoning.
In the 1970s, the country’s chronic gas shortages led to a surge in people dropping plastic tubing — even garden hoses — into the gas tanks of parked cars to drain their fuel. The image of someone sucking on the end of a hose to initiate the suction (and spitting out the gas when it reached their lips) became a pop culture trope.
The ploy was annoying, but it didn’t cause permanent damage.
Car owners responded by buying locking gas caps and keeping a watchful eye on their parked vehicles.
Masala said he definitely would’ve preferred that the thief who struck his pickup had gone with the older method.
“I wish they would’ve just siphoned it,” he said.
But siphoning today is much harder than it used to be.
Most newer vehicles have narrow, curved filler necks leading to the gas tank, making it difficult to force a tube inside. Some vehicles also have internal flappers or baffles to thwart siphoning. And anti-pollution regulations mean fuel systems are often better sealed.
Gas thefts of all kinds tend to follow pump prices. Filling stations report more drive-offs, although that, too, has gotten harder thanks to prepay pumps. Some people have been caught dropping tubes into the underground storage tanks at service stations to steal gas. Others have used electronic tools to trick pumps into dispensing fuel for pennies on the dollar.
There have been sporadic reports of thieves drilling into car gas tanks going back at least a decade.
But high gas prices spur more incidents, such as when the national average price briefly reached an all-time high of $5 a gallon in mid-2022, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Now, high gas prices are back — along with the consequences.
One morning this month, workers at the Catholic charity St. Vincent de Paul in St. Louis noticed a dark stain on the ground next to the panel truck they use as a mobile food pantry.
Someone had drilled a hole in the gas tank, draining the pricey diesel.
Michael Meehan, the charity’s executive director, said they lost a full tank of gas. And the damage meant they would be without their truck for a while. They had to find a replacement to use for their mobile food pantry in the meantime.
Meehan said he was sympathetic to whoever did it.
“This is just another indication that these are difficult times for lots of people,” he said.
But he wished they’d chosen a different way to get what they wanted.
“Siphoning probably would’ve saved us some money,” he said.
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