Someone is charging their car for a fifth of the price right now. The person paying for it has no idea.
Scheme's spreading through private Telegram and WhatsApp groups offer deals like £50 of rapid charging for £10. All you do is send a photo of the charge point. It sounds like a clever workaround. It's fraud, and the driver is the easiest person in the chain to catch.
How it works
The person running the criminal group holds stolen card details. A driver photographs a public charger so its ID is visible, sends the picture with a payment, and the session starts remotely on someone else's card.
The driver gets a cheap charge. The criminal group keeps the £10. Days later, the real cardholder spots the transactions and disputes them. That's when the scheme unravels, and it unravels towards the driver.
Why there's no such thing as a £10 rapid charge
No legitimate network sells an 80% discount through a stranger in a chat group. Real offers are bought in an official app and paid to the network itself. Nobody else starts your session for you.
Versions of this scheme have already appeared in other markets as "unlimited" memberships with pre-loaded accounts. The packaging changes. The funding never does.
Why you will be caught
The group operator is a username. You are not.
Every session records the charge point, connector, time, energy delivered and payment used. That alone places you at the scene, and operators are now going much further. Many sites run ANPR, and a growing number of charge points have built-in cameras that capture your plate as you plug in. Before any power flows, your car shares unique identifying information with the charger, a digital fingerprint that stays the same whatever payment is used. Vehicles supporting ISO 15118, the standard behind Plug & Charge, also carry certificates linking the car to a specific account.
When a stolen card is disputed, operators have a plate, a vehicle fingerprint, potentially a certificate, and a timestamp. They are actively matching that data against fraudulent sessions. The trail doesn't lead to the group. It leads to you.
Knowingly using a service paid for with a stolen card is fraud under UK law, whatever you paid the middleman. The session can be cut the moment the card is flagged. And you've handed people who trade in stolen data your photo, number and payment details.
The saving is £40. The risk is a criminal record. Don't risk it.
Nobody gets it for free
The cardholder faces disputed transactions and a replacement card. The site host has already paid for the electricity, then absorbs the chargeback, fees and admin. And every honest driver pays through higher tariffs, tighter payment checks and less open access.
Spotting it, and what to do
The signs are consistent: a price far below the network's own, a request to photograph a charger, a session started by someone else, payment to an individual, and sales through private groups.
Don't pay, and don't send charger photos to anyone. If you've already used a scheme, stop. Keep the chat logs and payment records, report it to your bank and the UK's national fraud reporting service, and tell the charging network which sites were involved. Then warn the group.
A constant game of cat and mouse
Close one route and fraudsters look for the next. A charge point management system sees every session across an estate, so it spots patterns no single site would: the same card used miles apart within minutes, remote starts clustering on certain units, disputes stacking up at one location. Once visible, tokens can be blocked, sites alerted and evidence shared.
At Clenergy EV, we work hard to stay on top of it. Our in-house development team responds to new patterns without waiting on outside suppliers, and our support team live and work here and are security vetted.
The people running these groups operate as organised networks, often across borders, and tracing them takes time. The more data the industry pools, the faster they can be identified. In the meantime, the drivers using these schemes leave a plate, a vehicle fingerprint and a timestamp at every session. They are easy to find, and straightforward to prosecute.
If you manage public or workplace charging and want to understand your exposure, book a conversation with one of our team by filling in the form below.
A charge that sounds too good to be true always has someone else paying for it. Sooner or later, that could be you.
