“This happened to me before, and the guy sprinted out the store.”

A woman says she may have accidentally gotten a tank of gas for free after a strange glitch at a Love’s gas station.

TikTok user Kayotic (@636wannabe) shared the moment after stopping to fill up her car.

She says she finished pumping, removed the nozzle from her car, and turned back toward the pump—only to notice something was off.

According to Kayotic, the screen showed a total of $0 and said she had pumped 0 gallons of gas.

That didn’t exactly line up with what had just happened.

“Uhm… free gas orrr??” she wrote in the caption of her clip. As of this writing, her video has more than 3.5 million views.

What Kayotic’s video shows is not how a gas pump is supposed to finish a normal transaction.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) sets the model rules and standards that state officials use to test fuel pumps. Under its current Handbook 44, once a fuel delivery is complete, the dispenser is supposed to keep showing the total price and the amount of fuel delivered for at least five minutes—or until the next transaction is initiated.

That makes the screen in Kayotic’s video notable.

She says she had just finished pumping gas when she looked back at the screen and saw 0 gallons and a $0 total. The video doesn’t show what happened, so it’s hard to know whether the pump reset, glitched, or something else went wrong.

The video also does not show whether Love’s ultimately recorded a sale.

Love’s gives customers a way to look up missing receipts and says receipts can also be accessed through its app. Its receipt-request form asks for information including the purchase date, payment method, store number, and amount.

That would be the clearest way to see what the station actually recorded for Kayotic’s stop.

Fuel pumps are regulated measuring devices, too. NIST says retail motor fuel dispensers are subject to specifications and testing requirements intended to make sure the amount shown on the pump matches the amount actually delivered.

If a customer thinks a pump is giving an incorrect reading, the agency that handles the complaint depends on the state.  

So Kayotic may have stumbled onto a very lucky glitch—or simply a bad display. The video alone doesn’t reveal which.

Many viewers had their own theories about what happened, while others said they had seen similar glitches at gas stations before.

“This happened to me before, and the guy sprinted out the store begging for me to pay lol,” one person wrote.

Another commenter said they had a much luckier outcome.

“This happened to me! The system was down, I filled my tank for free. It was a blessed day.”

Not everyone thought Kayotic should treat the $0 display like an invitation to keep going.

“Don’t take too much cuz this can be considered stealing…sadly,” one viewer warned.

Others were more focused on how the pump itself worked.

“So what happened when your tank got full?” one person asked.

“When the tank is full, the gas stops on its own,” another replied.

Someone else asked, “Don’t the gas stop when you stop squeezing the handle?”

“Lol, both. If you lock it, it’ll stop when the tank i[s] full [due] to air pressure,” another commenter wrote.

And then there was the possibility nobody really wanted to think about.

“Imagine it’s just water going in your tank,” one person quipped.

Motor1 contacted Kayotic via TikTok direct message and Love’s through email. We’ll be sure to update this if they respond.


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