Commuter who dodged £20,000 of fares is finally caught after buying cheaper tickets and using invalid railcard discount
This is the moment a rail fare dodger was finally caught by investigators after evading nearly £20,000 in ticket costs in one of Britain’s biggest ever cases of its kind.
The offender had been paying for only a small part of his full journey from Surrey to London Waterloo, when he bought an e-ticket only from Vauxhall to Waterloo.
While this made his ticket much cheaper, the passenger was also using a 16-17 Saver Railcard he is not entitled to for a half-price discount which further reduced the price.
A South Western Railway revenue protection team identified him through CCTV and then eventually caught him in the act at Waterloo station to pursue a prosecution, after finding he had been evading an average of £35 each day going back to 2022.
The man is one of many ‘short farers’ seen on the network and had bought a ticket from Vauxhall, which is known a notorious fare dodging hotspot for such commuters.
SWR passengers often travel into London from much further afield but buy an e-ticket from a stop near Waterloo such as Vauxhall for a much cheaper fare, so they can try to go through the barriers without issue and avoid paying for the full journey.
The man also allegedly tried doing ‘doughnut tickets’, which is where you buy a short ticket for the first part of the journey, to scan the QR code on your entry barrier; and then another short ticket for the last section, to scan out at your destination station.
This can lead to a much cheaper fare because you do not pay for the lengthier middle section of the trip – meaning there is a hole in the journey, hence the ‘doughnut’.
But you still have a valid ticket to enter at a starting point and exit at the destination, and can therefore try to go undetected if you are not caught out by an inspector.
The latest episode of Channel 5 documentary ‘Fare Dodgers: At War with the Law’ showed undercover officers being deployed across stations which the man used.
A South Western Railway revenue protection team speak to the fare evader at London Waterloo
The man was intercepted after paying the incorrect fare and using an invalid railcard discount
Each time the passenger was on the move, the investigators tracked him in real time to pinpoint his arrival – and then apprehend him when he arrived at the platform.
The interception followed an eight-week investigation into the man’s fare evasion – and he was later offered an out-of-court settlement after admitting to all offences.
The £19,500 figure was arrived at following the investigation by SWR which pieced together all the times he had travelled on incorrect tickets and invalid discounts.
Fare evasion cases can sometimes conclude with passengers using lawyers to negotiate an out of court settlement with the train company in an attempt to avoid a damaging criminal conviction.
The SWR fraud team had access to the man’s full travel history so they were able to calculate how much he owed based on the ticket price and number of journeys not fully paid for, helping them determine his offending was prolific.
They could see from the data that the man purchased two tickets per day, applying a 16-17 Saver Railcard, which gives a 50 per cent discount he was not entitled to.
The video shows how the man was spotted travelling on the train by some members of the team, before others waited on the platform at Waterloo to intercept him.
The team approached him, with one of them asking: ‘Can I see your ticket, the one you just had there? So where have you travelled from today?’
He replied: ‘Er, from **** today, well **** this morning, sorry.’ The stations mentioned by the man were bleeped out of the programme.
The investigator then said: ‘Why do you have a Vauxhall to Waterloo ticket?’
The man is spoken to by investigators at Waterloo after only buying a ticket from Vauxhall
The team had waited for the man at Waterloo and stopped him as passengers got off the train
And the man responded: ‘Er, just because I didn’t manage to get one in time, so just one to get through the barrier.’
He was also then asked whether he had a 16-17 Saver Railcard, and the passenger admitted he did not.
The investigator continued: ‘So what I’m going to do, I’m going to give you a caution and I’m going to ask you some questions, yeah?
‘So you do not have to say anything, but anything you do not say might harm your defence if you do not mention it when questioned, when you later rely on it in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Do you understand the caution?’
The man said ‘yes’. He will later be invited into a second interview, when he can bring legal representation if he wishes and the facts of the case will be presented.
Asked why he bought the wrong ticket, he said: ‘Just because I didn’t get one this morning. It didn’t have barriers at the end. There’s not always a service at ****.
‘Sometimes I get on at ***. Then I tried to find the guy, but it was a very packed train. In fairness, I should have got one from the same train station I got on at. it’s just expensive to do so.’
The investigator later told viewers that the interception followed an eight-week investigation, and was ‘such a great result’, adding: ‘I’m so pleased that the team has managed to catch him. A real team effort, real sense of elation this morning.’
This incident was just one of an estimated seven million trips made each year without a valid ticket on SWR alone, out of an overall annual journey total of 153million.
South Western Railway, which operators services between Waterloo and South West England, said the total amount recovered from its revenue protection work totalled £3.4million last year
The man was intercepted by the investigators at London Waterloo railway station (file picture)
SWR, which operators services between Waterloo and South West England, said the total recovered from its revenue protection work totalled £3.4million last year.
Unpaid fares cost SWR nearly £40million a year – and across the UK network the figure rises to around £240million annually, according to the Rail Delivery Group.
The operator also issued the findings of a poll conducted by YouGov which revealed 76 per cent of Brits say those who deliberately avoid paying the correct fare are ‘exploiting the system, and it’s not fair to paying passenger’.
Some 68 per cent say that ‘fare dodging is a serious problem that should be penalised’, while 67 per cent agree that ‘railway companies should do more to catch those who intentionally avoid paying the correct fare’.
The most common reasons for Brits saying they should pay the fare included avoiding the risk of a criminal record (41 per cent) or fine (47 per cent), ensuring the railway has money to invest in its services (37 per cent) and protecting taxpayer money (24 per cent).
Peter Williams, SWR customer and commercial director, said: ‘Most customers on our network pay the correct fare and we understand genuine mistakes happen.
‘But, there’s growing evidence of some systematically abusing the system – a criminal offence that deprives the railway of hundreds of millions of pounds each year.
The first episode of the new series of Fare Dodgers last week saw a man finally caught at Preston Road station in London after he avoided paying for more than 200 Tube journeys
An investigator tells the man that the ‘game’s up’ while speaking to him at Preston Road
‘We have a responsibility to protect revenue from tickets so that money can be reinvested into delivering the best possible service. We’re proud of the work our revenue protection team does and the role they play in reducing fare dodging.’
He added that SWR was taking part in the programme to show ‘how effective our data-led approach and hard-working team are at identifying and deterring fare evaders, keeping travel fair for fare paying customers’.
Mr Williams also claimed his teams have ‘helped cut ticketless travel by more than 40 per cent since 2017 and recover millions of pounds of taxpayer money’.
The first episode of the new series of Fare Dodgers last week saw a man finally caught at Preston Road station in London after he avoided paying for more than 200 Underground journeys using a concession card registered to a female relative.
Passengers are evading fares using passes which give free off-peak travel to the cardholder, such as the Freedom Pass for the over-60s, but cannot be used by anyone else – something that Transport for London teams are cracking down on.
