Amid Kiwis ongoing anxiety about the rising price of petrol, a popular fuel comparison app is reportedly being flooded with fake price entries.
The domestic cost per litre of petrol has been surging as ongoing conflict in the Middle East disrupts the release of crucial supplies.
Consumers panicking at the pump have turned to platforms like the fuel-tracking app Gaspy, which provides real-time price comparisons based on user generated entries.
But members of the Gaspy Carmunity New Zealand group have complained some of the app’s “spies” are reporting incorrect prices for gas stations around the nation.
Several posts from the last few days noted prices had been inflated to “fearmongering” heights of $4.30 a litre, while others spotted numbers that were ludicrously low.
“People change it to be annoying and put the incorrect ones because they don’t want people going to the places that have cheaper fuel,” one commenter wrote.
The complaints come as scrutiny of the fuel industry’s alleged price gouging intensifies.
Earlier this week, the Commerce Commission announced it would be more closely monitoring petrol companies to ensure fuel pricing is not being unjustifiably inflated.
Commissioner Bryan Chapple recommended Kiwis use Gaspy as a resource for finding the cheapest fuel retailers in their area, throwing further support behind the small platform.
Gaspy director Mike Newton said there tended to be an increase in fake price reports any time there was a massive influx of new users.
“A lot of the time it’s just people are experimenting with the app, not realising that their actions are actually going out into the wider community.
“But we also do see the odd rogue user who are just being a nuisance and we have ways of shutting that down.
“And our users are generally pretty good at reporting it.”
On the Gaspy website, the app said it has “zero tolerance of bad Spy behaviour” and will investigate any reports of misuse.
Newton said: “That’s part of the reason that we require users to sign up with an account.
“If we do get people going rogue, we can ban the account.
“We also do have ways of identifying the device that they’re using. So if we saw a repeated pattern of behaviour, we can actually flag that device as being problematic and then if they try a new email address on the same device, it’ll still lock them out.”
Users can see who updated a price and when, but there is not an inbuilt function to report any misleading entries.
The process for logging errors is instead listed in the app’s frequently asked questions.
“Occasionally, a double agent will try to infiltrate our Carmunity,” it reads. “If you suspect a bad egg, take a screenshot of the price at the station and report via the contact us button.”
Members of the Facebook community suggested the developers need to take some action on the issue.
“There’s way too many of them tonight. I’m sure most of them are bots,” one commenter wrote. “They were literally changing multiple sites every couple of minutes. We need a proper system to do it.”
Newton said: “We have no evidence of robots using the app.
“If you look at the AI [artificial intelligence] platforms, for example, which are obviously taking off, they don’t currently have any way of using apps. They can only search websites.
“I think the system we’ve got is pretty robust. Some of it does require that we hear from the community about what they think might be fake prices.
“So we definitely encourage the users to phone it in essentially, email us through the app or they can put things on to our social media pages so that we can follow up because we can’t be watching every price in the country, especially when so much is going up at the moment.”
Newton pointed out the best antidote to fake prices was correct prices. “Even if people are putting fake prices up, if there’s an active community of users in that area then they very quickly get corrected.
“And the other thing, and we’ve always said this with the prices on Gaspy, is if they sound too good to be true or too bad to be true in the case of high prices, then that probably is the case.”