A West Virginia truck driver who invented fake gas stations and billed his employer for fuel his truck never used has been sentenced to two years and six months in federal prison. Jeffrey Jeffers, 35, of Williamstown, was sentenced on Monday, November 9, in Charleston for wire fraud, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of West Virginia announced.
Source: U.S. Department of Justice
U.S. District Judge Joseph R. Goodwin imposed the sentence, which will be followed by three years of supervised release. Jeffers must also pay $510,465.19 in restitution — the full amount he admitted stealing from his employer through false charges to company-issued credit cards.
How the phantom-fuel scheme worked
According to court documents and statements made in court, Jeffers delivered products by truck for a large provider of industrial gas from its distribution facility in Wood County, West Virginia, between November 2022 and July 2024. The delivery trucks were fuelled at the distribution facility itself, and they were also equipped with fuel credit cards.
Source: U.S. Department of Justice
As part of his guilty plea, Jeffers admitted that he opened online payment platform accounts in the names of fictitious service stations he created for the scheme. He then charged more than 900 phantom fuel purchases to his employer's fuel credit cards, payable to his own fake service-station accounts — in effect paying himself for fuel that was never pumped.
The detail that made the fraud so striking, prosecutors said, is that it was never needed to explain real driving: Jeffers admitted that his delivery routes normally never required any refuelling outside the distribution facility at all. Every outside fuel charge on his cards was, by his own account, part of the scheme.
A driver whose routes never required outside fuel still billed more than 900 outside fuel purchases — worth $510,465.19 — to stations that did not exist.
Jeffers pleaded guilty to wire fraud in July 2026, CDLLife reported. U.S. Attorney Moore Capito announced the sentence and commended the investigative work of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Assistant U.S. Attorney Gabriel Price prosecuted the case, which is listed on PACER as Case No. 2:26-cr-85.
Source: CDLLife
Why this matters for truck drivers
Fuel cards are standard equipment across the trucking industry, from national fleets to the small carriers and owner-operators many Punjabi diaspora drivers work for in the United States and Canada. This case is a reminder of how closely card transactions are tracked: hundreds of charges that did not match the driver's actual routes built the evidence that ended in a federal conviction.
For drivers, the practical lesson runs the other way as well — keeping your own fuel receipts and route records protects you if a company's card records are ever questioned. In Jeffers's case there was no dispute about the pattern: he admitted the charges, the fake stations and the total in his plea.
What happens next
Jeffers will serve his 30-month prison term followed by three years of supervised release, and the $510,465.19 restitution order stands as a federal judgment he must repay. The U.S. Attorney's Office did not name the employer, describing it only as a large provider of industrial gas with a distribution facility in Wood County, and no other defendants were announced in the case.