Fake ticket scam using stolen machine

[jon0844]

St. Pancras, Kings Cross St. Pancras, and Kings Cross are deemed to be separate stations.

I realise that now, but it's annoying that the site seemed to suggest underground and National Rail, but clearly that's okay at stations where it's one or the other - not a mix.

Anyway, I'll keep using my Barclaycard Oyster until it eventually stops working and then see what I can do. I still can't believe how much hassle it's been though.

Go to King's Cross to get a new Oyster.
Come home, register online, get a printout to show to staff.
Go back to King's Cross to get this activated.
Come home, attempt transfer from old card (fails because it thinks one card isn't an adult card) and then set up new card with auto topup, requiring another trip into London...

I give up!

There must be a fair few people with Barclaycard Oysters too, so why couldn't someone have set up a proper and easy way to sort things out? Like Barclays sending me a new card and giving me a phone number to get everything moved (just as you did when you got a replacement credit card).

Anyway, all off topic now.

 

[DownSouth]

This is not compatible with an asynchronous system because someone could pick up the same top-up several times before the gateline/bus/whatever reports that it's been picked up.

Rubbish, other public transport systems already have this feature working on their smartcards - including AdelaideMetro where the Metrocard validators on each bus/tram/train are updated only at the depot when starting/finishing a shift.

If this is too hard for the technicians in London to figure out, they can always just buy in the expertise from elsewhere - I believe it was Crouzet who built the AdelaideMetro system and managed to get it up and running with a nearly seamless transition from the old magstrip tickets.

 

[34D]

This is not compatible with an asynchronous system because someone could pick up the same top-up several times before the gateline/bus/whatever reports that it's been picked up.

Auto top-up overcomes the issue as you only have to nominate a station once to get it going, after which the auto top-ups trigger on any validation.

Some of the latest bus ticket machines have a SIM card - they can andd do transfer everything to the back office within a couple of minutes.

Updates to the Blacklist come through daily.

 

[PermitToTravel]

All TfL bus ticket machines are connected to the iBus radio, which (presumably through a SIM card) is in direct communication with the control rooms. It might be possible to implement a similar system for these, if there is demand

A simpler solution might be to give a list of auto-topups to buses/etc every night, and the next night sort it out if anyone's claimed their topup twice.

 

[Deerfold]

All TfL bus ticket machines are connected to the iBus radio, which (presumably through a SIM card) is in direct communication with the control rooms. It might be possible to implement a similar system for these, if there is demand

A simpler solution might be to give a list of auto-topups to buses/etc every night, and the next night sort it out if anyone's claimed their topup twice.

No, iBus sends location information back to its servers. The only current link to the ticket machine ensures that when the driver logs into their route the information is passed to iBus too. Sending information about every transaction on the bus would be a massive amount of extra data to handle.

At the moment even the information about schedules for the bus so that it knows which journeys are available to log in to are downloaded to the bus at the garage via WiFi, not when the bus is in motion.

 

[PermitToTravel]

Thanks - I was led to believe that iBus always tells the ticket machine where it is, so that with each tap the location can be locally recorded

 

[jon0844]

Sending information about every transaction on the bus would be a massive amount of extra data to handle.

I wouldn't have thought it was too much, but it wouldn't be quick enough as most M2M services still use only 2G. But, you could batch up the data (and compress it first) so I'd expect you could download blacklist data fairly quickly once a card is reported stolen or lost.

Even if it took 5-10 minutes to do so, that's likely to be more than ample to stop someone using the card.

In an ideal world, the machine would still accept the card and automatically alert the police or revenue teams to intercept the bus, but I can't see that happening.

 

[Deerfold]

In an ideal world, the machine would still accept the card and automatically alert the police or revenue teams to intercept the bus, but I can't see that happening.

Actually that can and has been done in specific instances - but at the moment there is no system to handle the volume of data that would be required for all card transactions.
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A simpler solution might be to give a list of auto-topups to buses/etc every night, and the next night sort it out if anyone's claimed their topup twice.

There's 43 million Oyster cards in circulation. I don't know how many of them have an online top up each day but that's a lot of transactions to send to 8000 buses. And if it happens to not get to the bus you're on it'll generate complaints.

 

[DownSouth]

There's 43 million Oyster cards in circulation. I don't know how many of them have an online top up each day but that's a lot of transactions to send to 8000 buses. And if it happens to not get to the bus you're on it'll generate complaints.

You're talking about a string of a few bytes per recharge transaction - let's be generous and say 40 bytes to also include some sort of security checksum. If every person using an Oyster card (about 7 million are in regular use) did an online/auto recharge on the same day, that's about a 250MB download which would take about 20 seconds (including a verification routine) over USB2.0 or WiFi connection loaded from a server at the depot.

In practice, the number of updates every day would be nowhere near that and the data file would therefore be much smaller.

If the updates are not loaded properly, anyone with an insufficient balance would simply get free travel if they used that bus - a fair result for the inconvenience and embarrassment caused through a system failure.

 

[318259]

Ticket stock probably isn't an issue. Lots of avantix stock is kept very insecurely around the network. Not all guards and revenue staff are conscientious. The fraudsters may even have had somebody on the inside, a cleaner maybe, able to pinch stock from a ticket office or guards bag.

It's quite common around Glasgow that if a ticket inspector is running out of tickets (i.e. they get 'the pink stripe'), they'll just replace the 'stack' of tickets in their machine, and just throw what's left of the old stack into the overhead luggage racks.

I've picked up a few dozen blank tickets this way. Just for novelty value, of course.