Imagine he will be off to the clink for this.
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.Would a guard sell a weekly season ticket on board a train though?
Rather a lot of assumptions being made here. Not all fare dodgers and fraudsters are penniless - some are very well off.these sort of people always do and that's when they get caught ! As for TOC's getting money back I doubt it he has probably spent it all and has very little assets to his name so a proceeds of crime seizure would be unlikely as for a civil court each TOC would have to sue separately and if he doesn't pay all they can do is send bailiffs in assuming he has anything worth seizing to sell
I seem to recall a case a few years ago where that happenedFor example if someone makes the same daily commute but always happens to travel when delays occur. Also they might make conflicting claims that would involve being in two places at the same time.
I suppose it's like a gambling addiction. The more you 'win', the more you try again.But this was far more than just Delay Repay fraud; how on earth he thought he was going to get away with this is beyond comprehension!
Would a guard sell a weekly season ticket on board a train though?
Sending the original ticket would presumably require posting it - which would be a bit of a faff.
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I'd rather hope our scarce prison places are reserved for more deserving cases than this
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 .One thing I'm surprised apparently isn't done is have a unique ticket number on all tickets sold, with that number traceable back to a central database so the TOC can easily check against the scans the claimant sends in that a ticket with that number and matching the details on the scan was in fact sold. That would instantly stop anyone from being able to claim with counterfeit ticket scans.
Guards can and will sell weekly tickets on board .Would a guard sell a weekly season ticket on board a train though?
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 .So how much do you think someone needs to steal before they should be sent to prison? £100k? £1 million?
Cut off the right hand, maybe?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 .
Rather a lot of assumptions being made here. Not all fare dodgers and fraudsters are penniless - some are very well off.
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 .
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 .
Rather a lot of assumptions being made here. Not all fare dodgers and fraudsters are penniless - some are very well off.
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).
So how much do you think someone needs to steal before they should be sent to prison? £100k? £1 million?
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.
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.
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.
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.How do you handle the many e/m Tickets?
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.
Could you elaborate? I imagine the 'red flag' hierarchy for identifying potential delay repay fraud goes something like: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.
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.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.
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.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.
TOCs are starting to share information, but they have to be careful not to fall foul of data protection laws.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.
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 !.TOCs are starting to share information, but they have to be careful not to fall foul of data protection laws.
If I were railway companies I would be hiring him to beef up their security systems! He's the Frank Abagnale of train fraud.