Diesel is at record highs. Carrier margins are razor-thin. And some of the hardest fuel fraud to catch comes from people who already have legitimate access. Relay Pulse helps stop it before the loss hits your bottom line.
Fuel has always been one of a fleet’s biggest expenses. But right now, getting fuel management wrong is brutally expensive.
In September, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) put the national average retail price of diesel at a staggering $6.529 per gallon, an all-time high. Yet at the same time, carriers have almost no cushion to absorb costs like that. ATRI’s latest analysis found that the average cost to operate a truck hit a record $2.336 per mile in 2025, while average operating margins for truckload and refrigerated carriers were just 0.4% and 0.6%, respectively.
At prices and margins like these, “a little” fuel leakage isn’t little anymore. And as fleets raise fuel limits to accommodate more expensive fills, a bad actor can do more damage with the same access than they could just months ago. When every dollar matters, every gallon matters.
And the fraud environment is only getting tougher.
The pressure isn’t only coming from diesel prices. Fraud across transportation and logistics is accelerating and getting harder to spot.
The Transportation Intermediaries Association (TIA) recorded more than 1,600 fraud reports in six months, up 65% from the previous reporting period, in its 2025 State of Fraud in the Industry report. And new technology is giving bad actors more tools, with increasingly convincing AI-generated messages, voices, and impersonation attempts adding to the threat.
But some of the hardest fuel fraud to stop doesn’t require a stolen card, a hacked account, or a sophisticated cybercriminal.
Sometimes, the person stealing the fuel is exactly who they say they are.
That’s first-party fuel fraud: even when an authorized driver is at an approved fuel stop with legitimate access to Relay, the fuel can still end up somewhere the fleet never intended.
A driver whose tank is already full could bring their truck and phone to an approved stop, unlock a legitimate fuel code, and put the diesel into someone else’s truck. A driver who should no longer have access could still use an active fuel policy to buy or sell fuel.
Nothing was necessarily hacked. The credentials were real. The driver was authorized.
The fuel just didn’t go where the carrier thought it was going.
One widely cited industry estimate suggests that 5% to 10% of a fleet’s annual fuel consumption can be lost to theft or misallocation.
For a fleet fighting for every fraction of a point of margin, that’s not a rounding error.
Relay already protects the payment. Pulse adds the truck.
Relay was built to eliminate the vulnerabilities that come with traditional physical fuel cards.
There’s no physical card to skim or clone. Drivers use one-time RelayCodes instead of reusable card credentials. Relay confirms that the driver’s phone is at the fuel stop, while carriers control fueling limits through digital policies, limits, restrictions, and prompts.
Relay Pulse and Relay Pulse Pro build on those protections by connecting Relay directly to your fleet’s ELD data, adding the truck to the fueling decision.
Instead of only asking whether an authorized driver is at an authorized fuel stop, Relay can also ask:
Is the right truck there? Is this driver supposed to be operating it? And does the amount of fuel being requested actually make sense for what’s already in the tank?
Relay Pulse works with 300+ ELD providers, adding real-time controls designed to stop misuse before the fuel leaves the pump instead of forcing your team to find it days or weeks later in a report.
Right driver. Right truck. Right place. Right amount.
With Relay Pulse and Pulse Pro, fleets can:
- Verify the truck is actually at the fuel stop. Compare the truck’s ELD location with the driver’s location before allowing fueling.
- Verify the right driver is operating it. Sync driver-to-vehicle assignments and check on-duty status where supported.
- Stop paying for fuel a truck doesn’t need. Pulse Pro can set tank-level thresholds and limit purchases based on the capacity remaining in the tank.
- Know when the fuel may have gone somewhere else. Get alerted when fuel was purchased but the truck’s tank level doesn’t increase as expected.
- Keep access and data current automatically. Sync drivers, truck numbers, odometers, and other information through the ELD instead of relying on manual updates.
Put simply: Is the fuel you paid for actually going into the truck you meant to fuel, in the amount that truck needs?
Pulse helps answer that question before it becomes an expensive surprise.
Stop finding fuel fraud after the fuel is already gone.
For Royal Carrier LLC, that added visibility has made a real difference.
“We can now accurately track fuel usage and cost in real-time,” said Navjot Thandi, Operations Manager at Royal Carrier, adding that the company now has “no more guessing, and no more theft.”
That’s important because first-party misuse can otherwise be remarkably easy to miss. Maybe an MPG report eventually looks strange. Maybe accounting catches something during reconciliation. Maybe someone notices that a driver has been buying more fuel than expected.
But by then, the fuel is already gone.
With diesel above $6 a gallon, higher fueling limits, and carrier margins measured in fractions of a percent, that’s an expensive way to find out something went wrong.
Relay’s cardless fuel payments already eliminate many of the vulnerabilities associated with traditional fuel cards. Relay Pulse and Pulse Pro go one step further, connecting the payment to the driver, the truck, and the tank so you can stop first-party misuse before another unauthorized gallon hits your bottom line.
Want to see how Relay Pulse can help protect every gallon? Learn more about Relay Pulse and talk with our team.
