A petrol station owner has taken matters into his own hands by installing £12k ANPR cameras to catch fuel thieves, after becoming frustrated with what he alleged as police inaction.
Goran Raven, the owner, decided to invest in number plate and facial recognition cameras after losing a staggering £30,000 over four years due to people driving off without paying for fuel at his forecourt near Romford, East London. The 49-year-old felt compelled to act after losing confidence in his local police force, which he believes treats petrol theft as a “low-level” crime.
The entrepreneur, whose petrol station has been a family business for nearly a century, said that Essex Police’s apparent disinterest in the crime spurred him to take defensive measures. Mr Raven had the ANPR cameras installed at his petrol station about nine months ago, at a cost of roughly £12,000. He reports that these, coupled with facial recognition technology cameras, have resulted in an approximately 80 per cent reduction in theft.
The father-of-two reflected: “I looked at the price [of the ANPR cameras] and thought, ‘That’s expensive’. But when you weigh up the losses it’s saving, it was a simple enough decision to make.”
Mr Raven calculates that he lost more than £30,000 in the four years prior to getting the ANPR cameras installed, solely from people driving off without paying for petrol.
He said: “It’s a massive problem all across the country. Most police forces don’t take these things as serious crimes. They view it as low-level crime. These tend to be county lines criminals – we are literally fuelling crime.”
The ANPR system operates using AI, cross-referencing the number plates of vehicles at the forecourt pumps with those registered on the DVLA database. When a number plate belongs to a different vehicle than the one it’s fitted to, an alert is dispatched to the shop and the pump can be halted straight away.
The technology also retains number plates of motorists who have previously made off without payment, enabling pumps to be switched off when such drivers are detected before they can take any fuel.
Mr Raven said: “It has cut fuel theft crimes by 80 per cent. As a business, it has been a game-changer. It’s the same people, and they now realise that even with fake plates we are going to stop you. We still get issues, but it’s significantly less.”
Mr Raven, whose family have run the petrol station since 1929, says he became frustrated by the perceived lack of action from Essex Police in pursuing and prosecuting offenders. He said: “I would go as far as calling police forces institutionally incompetent on this issue. We are a little village, surrounded by green fields and you wouldn’t think you would get targeted by criminals like we do.”
He added: “We stopped reporting crimes to the police about three or four years ago. I would provide names and addresses of shoplifters… But it was a waste of time. I did an FOI request to Essex Police for recorded crime over the last ten years. They came back with the data for seven years, and the rate of solving crimes was about seven per cent – horrifically low. Now, the police claim there’s no problem because no one reports the crimes.”
Mr Raven continued: “I think [police forces] are equally as incompetent as each other. Some police forces are taking this seriously; at one point Essex Police did.”
Mr Raven also invested in facial recognition cameras around nine months ago to deter shoplifters at the Budgens store on his forecourt. He said: “It’s phenomenally successful. We won’t confront the customer [when it highlights them as a shoplifter]. We offer them great customer service, asking if they need help with anything: that’s normally enough for them to swear at us and walk out the door. We are never going to stop all shoplifters, but people see the sign and walk away. It’s a great preventative measure.”
However, Mr Raven says that, realistically, would-be thieves deterred by his new technology will simply move onto another more vulnerable business.
He said: “I have to think about my family business. I’m the fourth generation – we’ve been here 96 years, selling Shell fuel since 1929. We are not part of government tick boxes, but we can defend ourselves and make it hard for people to commit crime. I’ve got friends who are police officers and I feel very sorry for the individuals, but for the organisations I have no sympathy at all. They choose some very strange stances. But the thieves are going to other petrol stations now, which is unfortunate.”
A representative for Essex Police stated: “The number of making off without payment offences has almost halved in the last year. Our specialist Business Crime Team work with businesses of all kinds to tackle persistent offenders and take measures to protect their business, and the force has secured more than 3,000 charges for theft from a shop offences in the last year alone.”
The representative added: “There are a number of steps businesses in the sector can take to prevent non-payment of fuel and we will work with businesses to implement crime prevention. Because we value our neighbourhoods, including our hardworking local businesses, we increased the size of our Neighbourhood Policing Teams at the start of April and since then they have secured more than 900 charges. All the while reported crime has fallen across the county and in the first half of 2025 we achieved a 10 percent increase in charges secured compared to the same period last year.”
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