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Man claims £40,000 of train refunds without paying for a single journey
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SouthStand
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I'd rather hope our scarce prison places are reserved for more deserving cases than this
paul1609
Established Member
Im not up to date with sales now as Im retired but until recently a 7 day Appledore (Kent) to London Zones 1 to 6 travel card plus high speed is £180. Guards used to get 5% commission on sales. it was very unusual for both the train manager on hs1 and the Guard on Marshlink to not offer you a renewal for the next day or even for Monday on Friday.
Marshlink guards would be upset if their customer had been poached by someone on HS1. Ive had an Eastbourne Guard telling me that I shouldn't renew on HS1 because it wasn't supporting my local line.
Belperpete
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Rather a lot of assumptions being made here. Not all fare dodgers and fraudsters are penniless - some are very well off.
pdeaves
Established Member
I seem to recall a case a few years ago where that happened
I suppose it's like a gambling addiction. The more you 'win', the more you try again.
I have seen various processes TOCs have to detect fraud. It has improved considerably over the past few years as has communication between TOCs; one unfortunate side effect is that there has also been an increase in the rejection of valid claims, if one of the "alarms" gets triggered.
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[.n]
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Yes, especially as (on my line) they get commission for it [rules may have changed, as I've not had occasion to buy one recently, and I think it also used to be possible to buy monthlies, depending on what the floor limit was, as I feel on occasion guards had to ring for authorisation when I purchased). I always found it a very convenient service. Apparently so rumor and myth has it, it was possible at one stage to sell Annual tickets on-board, which would definitely be a nice little bonus!!
I have started doing Delay Repay by post and requesting a cheque. Means sending a copy of my season ticket and I have requested cheques. Its my protest at mot being allowed to move my season ticket on to a smart card. Its actually easy and just as quick to do my post, the TOC pays the postage and I just need to take a photo of the cheque to pay it in! So its good for me, not the TOC
greatkingrat
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I'd rather hope our scarce prison places are reserved for more deserving cases than this
So how much do you think someone needs to steal before they should be sent to prison? £100k? £1 million?
Tickets do have a unique ID on them , it is possible from a ticket to tell which location (even on board machines have a location they belong to) and which individual machine has sold a ticket .
What clearly cannot have been happening is every individual ticket number being checked , I guess probably due to the volume of delay repay cases . Maybe a random sample are checked .
Guards can and will sell weekly tickets on board .
Slightly pedantic perhaps but this was not stealing , fraud is something different . And I dont think there should be a finite amount , it should depend on other factors in the case . Even if someone has stolen £1million , unless they are a danger to the public I think there are other means to deal with that besides imprisonment .
Cut off the right hand, maybe?
In my line of work i get plenty of fare evaders and people that forever owe you a fare or try it on and to be honest they are almost all penniless
I remember a brief going out about this guy. They knew what he was up to but just couldn't quite locate him at the time. If I remember rightly the brief was about not over riding credit and debit cards that declined.
One very strange feature of the Avantix at the time though. It had a hot card warning feature. But you could only view it if you over rode the card. So you had to be naughty to be nice, or was it the other way round?
One very strange feature of the Avantix at the time though. It had a hot card warning feature. But you could only view it if you over rode the card. So you had to be naughty to be nice, or was it the other way round?
Puffing Devil
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It makes a persuasive case for a central delay repay processing centre with robust processes for checking claims. Frequent claimers could be flagged for additional scrutiny.
It's a simple matter to flag up people with questionable histories - multiple claims at the same address, multiple repayments to the same details, many claims on the same day in different parts of the country, etc.
It's a simple matter to flag up people with questionable histories - multiple claims at the same address, multiple repayments to the same details, many claims on the same day in different parts of the country, etc.
DynamicSpirit
Established Member
That's part of it. But what you also need is that the machine logs that it has sold a ticket with ID X, and that ticket is (say) an off-peak return dated 2 Feb from Chester to Manchester or wherever - and those logs get uploaded to a central database so that when you fill in your claim, it can be automatically verified that the ticket number you are claiming for does match the ticket details you are claiming for. (And, obviously, the ticket numbers should be allocated in way that prevents a member of the public attempting to forge a ticket from being able to make up a correct ticket number).
Judging from the fact that this guy was able to make multiple successful claims using forged scans, despite people on this thread reporting that the TOCs had flagged the activity as suspicious, it seems unlikely that this kind of central database exists (or if it does, it's not easy for TOCs to check it).
I would agree that other factors should come into whether the person should be sent to prison. However, in this case, if the facts are as reported, then the person appears to have deliberately and repeatedly committed fraud in a pre-meditated manner over a substantial period of time. I would think that alone should be enough to move this into the custodial-sentence category.
This is true, but I suspect the better off ones don't attend court "wearing a black, plastic rain jacket, jeans and holding a black Adidas bag." I bet the city boy who got caught travelling from well out of London on a travelcard dressed smartly for his day in court.
I wonder if it's less that it's not easy to check it than it's more time consuming to look up every ticket reference than it is to do a quick visual check of the start and end stations on the ticket? Depending on the volume of claims received and the proportion of those that are fraudulent, it might not be worth the extra costs of checking everything to that degree and just relying on the other checks to pick up the worst offenders like our man here.
BanburyBlue
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Just a quick check of the online Magistrates Court sentencing guidelines, this looks like it fits squarely into prison territory. Based on value of fraud, and sustained over a period of time.
Strat-tastic
Established Member
How can £40,000 claimed in six months not trigger any alarms? That's one heck of a bash! 
Is it possible to even spend that amount in that time?
You'd be surprised. A lot of wealthy people dress like paupers and vice versa. Got money but too miserly to spend it on tidy clothes.
Is it possible to even spend that amount in that time?
You'd be surprised. A lot of wealthy people dress like paupers and vice versa. Got money but too miserly to spend it on tidy clothes.
Kite159
Veteran Member
How can £40,000 claimed in six months not trigger any alarms? That's one heck of a bash!
Is it possible to even spend that amount in that time?
You'd be surprised. A lot of wealthy people dress like paupers and vice versa. Got money but too miserly to spend it on tidy clothes.
Just look at the banker on £100K+ who got suspended this week from his job for stealing sandwiches from the canteen.
thenorthern
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Regarding the refund system with the old system where you had to physically send a ticket off by post it was very hard to fake a ticket as unless you had waxed paper with a magnetic strip on the back it was hard to replicate a ticket.
Today however it's much easier to fake a ticket as people are asked to upload it's very easy to photopshop a ticket and unless one zooms into the photo of the ticket to check the pixels the rail company will just assume it's genuine.
Today however it's much easier to fake a ticket as people are asked to upload it's very easy to photopshop a ticket and unless one zooms into the photo of the ticket to check the pixels the rail company will just assume it's genuine.
Puffing Devil
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How do you handle the many e/m Tickets?
daveshah
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I don't know the internals of the systems that issue them, but I strongly suspect these would be much easier to trace in an automated way, the encrypted/signed barcode and centralised (per seller) issuing being a start.
DynamicSpirit
Established Member
Possibly. There should be technological solutions - for example, in principle, it ought to be possible to have an automated system that checks that the ticket number matches the journey details on the form the claimant submits - at least for claims submitted electronically, so that the person assessing the claim is immediately informed if there's a mismatch.
I wonder if the real issue is perhaps that it's not seen as worth investing in the software to enable that because this kind of fraud is probably still relatively uncommon. It's a pure guess, but I'm guessing a much bigger issue is people who DO have valid tickets simply claiming they were on a different train from the one they were actually on - and being able to check tickets will obviously be useless against that kind of fraud.
Could you elaborate? I imagine the 'red flag' hierarchy for identifying potential delay repay fraud goes something like:
1. Above average claims by the individual?
2. Are claims on one route or multiple routes?
3. If on one route, are claims above average for that route?
4. Unusual claim patterns (i.e. not at 8 in the morning and 5 in the evening to match a working day)
Re. the individual who got caught de-frauding them out of 40k: clearly a grade A idiot if he thought that would not arouse suspicions within a 6 month period - let alone a 6 year period. Although why it's taken them 7 years to get this to court is also concerning.
I always use e tickets and have to take a screenshot of the QR code to claim. I guess that's quite hard to fake, however there's no way to prove I was on a particular train.
On the subject of e tickets they seem very insecure, what's to stop me sending a screen shot to a friend? I guess barriers can spot a used ticket but would gate line staff just let you through anyway?
On the subject of e tickets they seem very insecure, what's to stop me sending a screen shot to a friend? I guess barriers can spot a used ticket but would gate line staff just let you through anyway?
You're on the right lines. I hesitate to say more, because if the methods became public knowledge they would be less effective. DfT is very keen to prevent fraud, so this is an area that is getting increasingly sophisticated.
Belperpete
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Tickets are sold by TOC s and a variety of third-party sellers, using a variety of different systems. I would be very surprised if one TOC could routinely access another TOC's records, or those of a third-party seller.
TOCs are starting to share information, but they have to be careful not to fall foul of data protection laws.
Peter Sarf
Established Member
Apparently in the travel insurance industry the different insurance companies started sharing data on claims. It was to see if some people were claiming quite regularly. The surprise was a proportion of claimants were claiming for the same lost baggage on the same trip but on more than one policy !.
I was involved in a scheme to identify multiple mobile phone users paying with the same bank details. This was back in the 1990s when you could get a discount or a certain package only if the customer was on direct debit. So some sales persons were using one customers bank details on another persons contract. I cannot believe it was worth the risk but there you go. What I found was quite a few cases where one set of bank details was obviously used for subsequent contracts one or two years apart. The customer was paying for a phone they had stopped using and never bothered to check the bank statement !. Three were also plenty of cases where the old phone was handed down to a relative - indicated by it still being active.
RJ
Established Member
I wouldn't give him that much credit. What he has done is fairly basic in the grand scheme of things! Some people have a natural facility for learning how systems work through research and trial and error. Some people use that skill to take advantage of legal loopholes - others are fraudulently minded and use it to do illegal things.
These people stress test. It is known there's a limit to what you can do to a business as a "sharp" customer. Some people take advantage a little then leave it. Others don't have any kind of limiter or inhibitor and hammer it until they get flagged and stopped. I am amused when I hear of people doing this in a legal manner but not impressed by illegal fraud. Businesses need to get equally sharp people on side to stop such behaviour before it costs them too much. I often get the impression that people in teams tasked with dealing with suspicious activity are trained to read the red flags but really don't understand what the customer is doing.
There are a lot of "smart" patrons of the railways who are pulling fiddles and by and large it is let go. The view is that it's cheaper to let it run than go after the perpretrators or put in effective preventative measures. As a humble ticket office clerk I am amazed as just how brave people get with fraudulent behaviour!
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