On 17 Sep, 23:31, Charles Ellson wrote:

On Wed, 17 Sep 2008 09:09:28 -0700 (PDT), Mizter T

wrote:

On 17 Sep, 16:08, Charles Ellson wrote:

On Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:47:26 -0700 (PDT), Mizter T

(snip)

As ever it's difficult to discuss the potential holes in ticketing
without also flagging them up to those who might wish to take
advantage.

I doubt if that particular fiddle is any secret.

By its very nature it can't be a secret - as I said in a post
upthread, working this through is "hardly beyond the realm of most
peoples capacity for logical thought" - however I've never seen or
heard or read about it anywhere, and despite my earlier comment most
people don't spend a lot of time thinking about such things.

That said, any fiddle that relies upon this is fairly limited in its
scope, and what's more it is unknown whether there are any
countermeasures and if so what they are, e.g. if a ticket is pre-
encoded for use on a particular day of the week, or on an odd or an
even date etc etc.

IMU it would have become encoded (in terms of applying a date) the
first time it passed through a ticket barrier at an Underground
station. AFAIAA bus inspectors only have Oyster card readers and Mk1
eyeballs so presumably a 1-day Travelcard would have to be taken to a
station unless someone has been specially armed with a magnetic card
reader.


Yes, I understand all that - I was pondering the notion that whilst
these tickets will not be encoded with a specific date, shopkeepers
might be issued with several batches of tickets - each batch being pre-
encoded so as only to be valid according to some criteria, for example
only on Mondays or only on even or odd dates - therefore the
shopkeeper would have to ensure that whatever ticket they sold to the
customer came from the appropriate batch.

Such a 'countermeasure' would mean that there would at least be an
element of uncertainty introduced over whether a ticket gate would
accept a particular ticket (unless of course the fiddler had worked
out how this scheme worked). Of course the advantages of any such
scheme must be offset against the (hardly unlikely) possibility that a
shopkeeper might get muddled up and issue the wrong ticket stock for a
particular day to a customer, which would mean that quite legitimate
passengers could get caught up in the web of suspicion.