Odometer tampering ('Firki') is the malpractice of rolling back the odometer reading to make it look like the vehicle has traveled less than the actual. Frequent tampering may put your vehicle odometer out of function, eventually. A vehicle with odometer rollback represents an increased risk for the buyer which directly affects the vehicle price and durability of the vehicle.
Why odometer is being tampered?
Tampering is a very common practice in the fleet industry, and drivers are doing this fraud to fool their vehicle owners by increasing odometer reading and charge extra money. Sometimes fleet owners are aware of such tampering but they lack solid evidence on that to take further corrective measures.
Traditional ways of detecting odometer tampering
There are many ways to detect if the odometer has tampered or not. Here are the basic few.
. Check the original vehicle service history. Every manufacturing brand service station records the vehicle odometer reading and the date of repair. Giving a check to the last service and the odometer reading, you will be able to guess the actual odometer reading.
. Look for any dent or smudge mark nearby your odometer and also check if the odometer numbers are properly aligned.
. If you find any extra switches on the vehicle dashboard, it may be used for switching odometer ON or OFF because no vehicle dashboard has any spare switches.
Odometer tampering detection with fleetx
Odometer tampering is very common malpractice in the transportation industry and this happens very frequent so, this is very important for fleet owners to know about such frauds done by their drivers. Drivers counterfeit with odometer to earn extra money by increasing the KM reading in odometer to earn on distance based trips or by decreasing the actual KM reading to save money on fuel consumption by showing less mileage. But with fleetx you don't have to worry about such frauds anymore because we have our unique way to filter out such cases, some of them are highlighted below.
We also provide detailed visibility of all such tampered cases. One such tampering case captured by our device is briefed below:
As in the above sample, the odometer reading showing distance traveled is 81.1 km in 13 min, but our device measured the actual distance as 11.9 km. This shows that there is a mismatch of 69.2 km between actual distance traveled and the distance according to the odometer reading. This happened because the driver tampered with meter and increase the odometer reading in such a way to make it look like the vehicle traveled 81.1 km.
Impact of the odometer tampering in terms of revenue loss.
The average rate of a vehicle trip is 12 Rs/km, so with this rate, the driver would get an extra 830 Rs for this trip as per his increased odometer reading. This amount is only for this trip, if a vehicle is doing 3 trips per week, the amount would reach an extra 2490 Rs for one vehicle per week. Imagine if you have hundreds of vehicles and every vehicle is doing two or three trips per week, the amount would reach thousands and more which is the direct revenue loss to the company and can not be ignored. So, we highlight all such cases in our dashboard as a proof for you to take necessary action against these fraud cases.
Be vigilant of all such tampering with our fleet management solution and start with a free demo here.
