A scary little warning has been making the rounds: thieves are supposedly jamming a screw into the gas pump nozzle cradle so the pump keeps running after you drive away, letting them fill their own tanks on your card. It sounds like exactly the kind of low-tech, high-payoff trick that would spread fast. The problem is that when fact-checkers went looking for a single verified case, they came up empty.
What the Warning Claims
The alarm got a boost from the Timberville Police Department in Virginia, which told drivers to watch for what it called “gas pump screw scams.” The idea is simple enough to sound believable. A scammer hides a screw inside the nozzle cradle, that screw keeps the transaction from closing out, and once you drive off, someone else pumps gas into their own tank and gas cans while your account stays open.
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Julie Wheeler, president and CEO of the Better Business Bureau serving western Virginia, framed it as the next evolution past the familiar card skimmer. According to her, the new angle is about keeping a transaction from finishing so someone can slide in behind you and run up the charge on your dime. She pushed the usual advice that comes with any pump-fraud story, telling drivers to inspect the pump before and after fueling and to watch for signs of tampering.
The Advice Itself Isn’t Bad
Here’s the part worth keeping even if the scam turns out to be smoke. Wheeler suggested avoiding the pump farthest from the building, since the ones out of the attendant’s line of sight are the easiest to mess with. She recommended fueling closer to where staff can actually see what’s happening.
She also leaned hard on payment habits: lock your card when you’re not using it if your bank offers that feature, check your statements daily through online access so a bad charge can’t sit unnoticed, and reach for a credit card over a debit card at the pump, because a disputed credit charge can be challenged before you ever pay it, while a fraudulent debit charge pulls real money out of your account immediately and forces you to chase it back.
Anthony Ramsey, a program manager with the Virginia Department of Agriculture’s Office of Weights and Measures, which handles gas pump inspections, added the most practical tip of the bunch. Make sure your transaction is actually finished before you pull away. Get a receipt that confirms it ended, or watch the screen reset back to its starting display. That’s solid guidance no matter what’s going on at the pump.
And This Is Where It Falls Apart
The fact-checking site Snopes dug into the screw scam and found nothing underneath it. According to Snopes, the people and groups spreading the warning failed to point to any credible, verified report of criminals actually using screws to drain drivers at the pump. No documented victims. No confirmed incidents. Just a warning that kept getting repeated.
Even one of the law enforcement offices that helped kick off the panic walked it back. The Queen Anne’s County Sheriff’s Office in Maryland had posted a warning, then updated it to say the reports in the county were determined to be unfounded, with additional claims at other stations still under review. That’s a notable reversal from one of the original sources.
A viral video showed a screw sitting on a pump at a Shell station, which is the kind of image that travels fast. But a Shell spokesperson told Snopes the company wasn’t aware of any reported incidents and pointed out that the pumps are built with an automatic shut-off that ends a transaction after a stretch of inactivity. That detail matters, because the whole scam depends on a pump that just keeps running, and the hardware is specifically designed not to do that.
Snopes didn’t stop there. It reached out to several oil and gas companies and law enforcement offices. Phillips 66, Conoco, and 76 all said the same thing: none of them had received reports of this happening.
Who Actually Loses Here
The frustrating thing about a story like this is how it muddies real advice with imaginary threats. Skimmers are a genuine problem. People do get their card data lifted at the pump. So when a dramatic, unverified scam goes viral and then gets debunked, it risks training drivers to roll their eyes at the next warning, including the ones that are real.
There’s also the trust cost. When a police department and a consumer watchdog amplify a claim that fact-checkers can’t substantiate, and one of those agencies has to publicly retract it, that’s not nothing. Drivers are left trying to figure out which warnings to take seriously, and that confusion is its own kind of vulnerability.
So check your pump. Lock your card. Use credit instead of debit and make sure the screen resets before you leave. Those habits protect you from the threats that genuinely exist. As for the screw in the nozzle cradle, the people who would know best are all saying the same thing, and right now that thing is that nobody can find a single real case of it actually happening.