Ep. 640 What to Do After A Vehicle, Equipment or Fuel Theft
Fuel theft is a serious and growing business risk. Rancho Mesa’s Alyssa Burley sits down with Jessee Keirstead, Rancho Mesa’s new Risk Control Consultant to talk about what to do after a vehicle, piece of equipment or fuel is stolen.
Show Notes: Subscribe to Rancho Mesa's Newsletter
Host: Alyssa Burley
Guest: Jessee Keirstead
Editor: Jadyn Brandt
Music: "Home" by JHS Pedals, “Breaking News Intro” by nem0production
© Copyright 2026. Rancho Mesa Insurance Services, Inc. All rights reserved.
Transcript
Alyssa Burley: You’re listening to Rancho Mesa’s StudioOne™ podcast, where each week we break down complex insurance and safety topics to help your business thrive. I’m your host, Alyssa Burley, and I’m joined by Jessee Keirstead, Risk Control Consultant with Rancho Mesa. Today, we’re going to talk about what to do after a vehicle, piece of equipment or fuel is stolen. Jessee, welcome to the show.
Jessee Keirstead: Hey, how you doing?
AB: Good we’re glad you’re here. Now, we’ve recently spoken on this podcast about the increase in vehicle, equipment and fuel theft on jobsites. And, you’ve written a few articles on the same topic. So when a company discovers that a vehicle, piece of equipment, or fuel has been stolen, what are the most important actions they should take in the first few hours, and why is timing so critical?
JK: On that last piece, obviously timing is critical because the sooner we act, the more likely we are to recover the equipment or identify who is responsible for that theft. So the first thing that we're going to want to do is call the police and it sounds obvious, right? But we're going to want to try to file a report, provide them with as much information as possible, like the PIN number, the serial number. photos, GPS pings, geofencing event, any data that we have related to that, the more we can provide them, the more likely we are to recover that equipment and another reason why we want to submit a police report, because if we are going to submit that to the NER, the National Equipment Registry, which we talked about in a previous podcast, they're going to require a police report to submit that. So as we discussed during that podcast, NER can be quite effective in recovering equipment, whether it's immediately or down the road but, in order to do so and submit a report with them, we do have to have that police report first and then the NER will also report that to the NICB, which is the National Insurance Crime Bureau, which will help us hopefully potentially track down that equipment and deal with the insurance side of it down the road.
Notify Rancho Mesa and hopefully have us notify the insurance company as quickly as possible too. That can go a long way in helping with things like subrogation efforts and then hopefully shorten that investigation period to help you with that claim and recover as much as we can as soon as possible. Same deals, we want to try to make sure that we have as much information as possible when it comes to that. It's going to help with the insurance process. Things like purchase records, pin, license plate, if it's like a trailer or something like that. Anything that could identify that equipment as unique, like concealed markings or damage to that equipment, maintenance logs, IDs, anything that associated with the equipment, and then notify outlets like contractors. You know, sometimes that equipment walks from one site and ends up on another and if there's something distinct about your vehicle or your equipment, rather, that could kind of set that apart, make it easily known that that might be yours.
Obviously, they'll probably remove things like, you know, your company name, but if there's something specific about that equipment that stands out that other contractors might easily notice, whether it's not on their job site specific or a future job site, they can keep an eye out for it for you and hopefully get to…. get that back to you, relay that back to you or the authorities or whoever it is that might be able to help.
AB: So if you're a member of an association for your industry, you might reach out to some of the members and say, hey, we lost this piece of equipment if you see it on job site, let us know.
JK: Yeah, it's a great idea
AB: So you also emphasize the importance of documentation and record keeping throughout your article. So what types of records should companies maintain before a theft occurs, and how can those records help during recovery efforts and insurance claims?
JK: Yeah, so the basics, you know, pretty obvious, right? Like the manufacturer, the make and model of the equipment, the year, serial number, any sort of asset ID, or like I said, license plate number if it comes to trailer, VIN number, those sorts of things arekind of bare minimum obvious that most people are aware of. I think it's always a good idea to photograph your equipment, you know, through the life cycle of it. Again, like we had talked about before, is any sort of distinct characteristic of that vehicle is really helpful when it comes to identifying that down the road, whether it's damage or something you modified, right. If you add our aftermarket parts to it or pieces or you upgraded or something unique that kind of signifies that it belongs to your organization is really helpful. So any photos of that or videos that you've taken along the way could be helpful in that recovery process or hopefully with the claims process as well too.
Ownership and purchase records kind of demonstrating that the value of the equipment and how long you've owned it for and what you used it for, the life cycle of it. Any GPS or telematics data, regardless of if it was removed on site, that can indicate, right, like what time it happened or where it happened. And that can use, the law enforcement can use that information to potentially track down future videos or whatever it is, right, to try to maybe identify where the equipment went or who took it.
Any equipment assignment or location logs could be helpful, too, so we can know who was the last person to operate that machinery. Not to necessarily accuse them, but maybe they have information that could lead to recovery. Did they accidentally leave the keys in there? Did they have the keys? Did they document where the keys went? Was there a period of time wLocation keys weren't accounted for? location logs in terms of the equipment, right? Maybe there's a mistake where the equipment got picked up and went to another site that that information wasn't relayed. So we really don't have a theft on hands, and if we're not tracking that, then it's hard to kind of, that may slow down the recovery process, right? Well, the assumption may be that, hey, maybe we took it to another site or we picked it up and we returned it, but we didn't really log that. and, you know, track how that was done. So that time period before you realize that it was taken or stolen really decreases the likelihood that we're going to, you know, track it down. And then again, I think key access controls is kind of an extra layer that we've talked about in the past, but if we're not keeping track of that also kind of increases the likelihood of us having our equipment stolen.
AB: Yeah. So how can, and you touched a little bit on this earlier, how can technology, such as GPS tracking, geofencing, and tools like the SafetyOne™ mobile app, help companies not only respond to thefts more effectively, but potentially detect losses much sooner?
JK: Sure. You know, some of the thieves are pretty sophisticated, right? Like they have not only methods of locating equipment that's, you know, that's easier to steal, but they also have ways to maybe identify some of the tracking equipment that we have on the vehicles, but some of them take extra layers of precaution as well, too, because there may be secondary trackers, there may be things that are on there. So I heard a story recently when I was talking about equipment theft with a client, and they told us a story about something that happened locally where a piece of decent-sized equipment was stolen from a job site. They brought their own trailer out, they got it onto the trailer, and then they took the trailer to a local town here in San Diego and dropped it off in a very busy area and it happened to be kind of blocking a driveway. So somebody called the police, police came, it was reported stolen. So the police told them is that a lot of times what they'll do is people who steal equipment is they'll bring it to somewhere that's very busy and leave it in the area and leave it for a couple of days. and see if someone comes and picks it up or see if the police come and check it out. They'll keep an eye on it. And if nobody comes over the period of a couple of days, they realize that there's probably no secondary trackers on there, right? But in this case, the client had like kind of a more well-hidden or, you know, GPS tracker on there that kind of, he flagged it down and went to that location and that kind of made, you know, brought up some awareness on the subject, right? And I say this to say that is that the more technology we can introduce, sometimes it does kind of go a lot further and may prevent some of these extra layers that the thieves are taking. So that GPS tracking doesn't always go the distance in some cases, but it may help us again, even if it doesn't track down where it is at the time, it may help us track down where it was before the last possible place before it was disabled which may not sound like it means much, but it could potentially lead somewhere.
Geofencing, and again, we kind of touched on it on a prior podcast, but basically kind of it creates an artificial area, like a map that if the equipment or whatever that's associated with that tracker leaves that boundary and sends you an alert, right? So if there's unexpected movement or leaves a particular area, or you can even have it associated with routes if it leaves that route. You're alerted, right? Any information we could draw from that, whether where it went or what direction it was heading or what time or, you know, whenever it left that specific area could be very helpful as well.
Telematic systems also sometimes have some tie-ins that could help with preventing thefts, like what time, the last time the equipment was started, right? So there's ignition alerts associated with some of the telematics. Unauthorized startups, so it can potentially detect if it was the key that started it or not battery disconnects so if they come along and they're disconnecting some of the things that may alert some of the GPS or anti-theft devices, it can detect when that happened. Movement alerts, engine hour monitoring, so how long they've been operating for, operator identification. So some of the more sophisticated systems might have individual tracking, like who was using the equipment, or even have cameras associated with that too. So if it's started up, it's moved, there's going to be a camera associated with that. But I think overall, providing any sort of digital trail is going to help us identify when, where, or how it occurred, who used the equipment last. and a probable timeline, which all could lead towards potential recovery, or at least give us an idea of how to prevent this from occurring again. So worst case scenario, we don't recover the equipment. We want to make sure that we're not making ourselves an easy target. And if we can figure out some of the information of how this happened, it might help us improve some of our efforts down the road, and that's information that we can share.
Here with other contractors, we can share with friends that you're working with on the site, and then you know, just future efforts that, you know, you can use to prevent those injuries are always good lessons learned. But another thing too is we talk a lot about Safety One, right? Like we want to encourage people to use that as much as possible. There's lots of ways that we can integrate Safety One into preventing theft. Like we had mentioned the inspection logs, right? We can definitely do that with Safety 1. We can talk about including things like GPS inspections, right? So when we're going out and doing our equipment logs, part of doing our equipment logs, if we have a GPS on the vehicle, we should put eyes on that and make sure that it's still working or make sure that it's still there. It hasn't been removed. Sometimes there's a process with equipment theft. They're going out there first they're getting it ready for the actual event of taking it. part of that might be removing the monitor, and we might not notice that until you know, it's already too late. So making that a part of your process, you know, there's lots of, there's training on there associated, you know, we can always add more training associated with equipment theft, but, you know there's, we can use safety one to do that you know, including that with your toolbox talks, assignment records, photo documentation of equipment, right? So in addition to our inspection process, there's ways in safety one that we can. Take photos. Again, we talked about those distinct characteristics or things like serial numbers or unique characteristics of that vehicle or equipment, PIN numbers, the license plate numbers. That's all data that we can track pretty easily, and then if there is an event, we can pull up a safety one as well too. Instant investigations are another piece that we can have in there as well. So just some ideas, but yeah, always want to throw that out there
AB: Yeah, it sounds like with Safety One, you could really use it on a regular basis to document the condition of your equipment, but even when you buy a new piece of equipment, you could have a mobile form that documents the VIN numbers, you know, all of those serial numbers, everything that's on it. And so when you do need that information, you can just pull it up in Safety One and take a look at it.
JK: Yeah, and that's a great idea, and I think that, like we had mentioned before, is the quickness, right? We want to make sure that we get that information as soon as possible, and if we're fumbling, looking around, not sure we kept it, and it's on a piece of paper in a drawer somewhere we haven't seen it for years since we bought that piece of equipment, right? Where this if it's digital on safety one we can pull it up and that's information we can share right away.
AB: yeah absolutely, all right Jessee this is all really great information I appreciate you coming in so thanks for joining me in studio one
JK: Thanks for having me.
AB: Thank you for tuning in to our latest episode produced by StudioOne™. If you enjoyed what you heard, please share this episode and subscribe. For more insights like this, visit us at RanchoMesa.com and subscribe to our weekly newsletter.