The Tigáz DSO-Kft. has about 9 billion forints’ loss annually, due to gas stealing.
As László Kállai, the manager of monitoring said, in 2010 they found out about more than 4000 gas stealing events, and in the first half of this year, they have found about 5000 irregularities. At the end of this year, this number can be as much as 10,000. The 10-12 % of aimed explorations is irregular gas drawing. On a territorial base, most of the gas stealing happens in Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg, Hajdú-Bihar and Pest County. Instead of the easy, home-made, ’do-it-yourself’ style solutions, well-organized enterprises deal with the installation of different gas-stealing technologies. László Kállai highlighted that 1.5% of the gas distributed by the corporation is stolen in the above mentioned territories. This quantity of 70 million m3 equals 1 year’s consumption of 50,000 (!) families. The manager said that the stealing is typical for the small consumers. As far as the prevention and exploration of these crimes are concerned, we are informed that the company spends millions on safety tools annually. The set of such tools involves industrial endoscopes, microscopes, thermal cameras, magnetic monitoring installations, etc. The price of a 10 million forints endoscope returns in 2 months. In 2010, due to new tools, the company could return 840 million forints of their 9 billion forint loss. The loss and stealing cannot be abolished, but due to the monitoring system, they can be limited.
