I can remember renting a house in Germany, sight unseen in a small town near where my new job was going to be in Edenkoben Germany. The house was set into a shaded north facing slope with about 140 steps to get from street level to the house. It was heated with oil. Half of the basement was taken up with a massive 2-3000 gal oil tank. It had a simple analog gauge that displayed the fuel level and on the day that I arrived on the property months after I signed all the documents, we went down in the basement with the owner and recorded the fill level of the oil tank by snapping a photo of the gauge with the agreement that I had to return it at the end of the lease at the same level as when received.
The first winter passed without incident and my wife and I started a discussion of setting up a regular deposit into a saving account so that we had the cash on hand to do a re-fill of the tank when the time came. When the following winter arrived, we had hardly got into the heating season before we woke up to the fact that the house was cold and apparently the furnace was not running. We went and looked at the gauge and the needle was showing about 35% full compared to the 50% it had been when we moved in. A technician was called and it was soon revealed that the tank was empty. This was a shock to the owner, since the gauge had previously been reliable. A bit of investigation showed that the gauge housing could be rotated and thus it was possible to place the needle at any point one wanted it at. Only the rotation angle of the scale changed. So the previous tenant had apparently doctored the gauge in an effort to cover up his consumption of fuel oil and the owner had fallen for it and the bad actor was long gone...
Since we knew the tank was currently empty and the capacity of the tank, we re-zeroed the gauge and added 50% to the tank so we had a known fill amount. By turning the gauge back to its original spot, we could back calculate how much the owner had been swindled, how much had actually been in the tank when we took control of the property and agree on the appropriate % fill at the completion of the lease agreement. Later that same winter the boiler controller went out and a new controller had to be installed and a few years after I left Germany the government banned the yellow flame oil burners altogether. Last year they introduced a ban on natural gas heating systems with everyone being phased out to all electric. Government overreach at its finest.