The article is poorly written. "Scammers are using cellphone's Bluetooth option to hack the pump - and get it for free." is all the detail you get. My cellphone's Bluetooth doesn't have that option.
"Paying at the pump is for chumps - when you can get gas for free - and illegal, but it didn’t stop a Detroit man from stealing almost 800 gallons of gas at the Shell at Eight Mile and Wyoming."
On iOS, there's nrf connect. Which is slightly more limited, but can still do BLE. I think there's other bluetooth-serial apps for iphones, but apple has a stick up their butt about bluetooth-classic not working super good unless the other device has a "made for i" chip/cert in it.
If either of these don't work well enough, ESP32s can be had for <$5 and can act as a bridge between your device and whatever you want to exploit.
Is BLE why "modern" iphones don't have issues with android/3rd party devices/accessories? I remember a long time ago when an iPhone meant you could only share bluetooth with other Apple devices. My iPhone today doesn't seem to be like that.
Also, you assume that someone wouldn’t just sell the gas they stole, which is probably very much worth the small investment in tools.
When you make a return without a receipt you generally just get store credit instead of cash. If you don't need some chips and tallboys, you can typically sell the credit to someone behind the station for .3 to .4 of the face value. That isn't great but since the gaming machines only take cash its a solid way to get liquid.