Prosecuted with no evidence or details?

[Tallguy]

The sole purpose of these interviews is to get you to incriminate yourself and provide the TOC with the evidence they don’t have so they can prosecute you. Others have suggested a written response asking for information and if I was in your shoes that’s what I would send. You are not obliged to attend a voluntary interview and I would never do so.

 

[fandroid]

Just a clarification note. On this forum we are generally very careful not to use the word "refund" when discussing applications for Delay Repay which is the compensation scheme that comes into play when your train is delayed.

Officially, "refunds" apply when either you don't use the ticket at all, or if the disruption was so bad that you abandon the journey.

Train company fraud investigators look hard at those refund applications, because fare-dodgers have been known to apply for refunds after they have actually travelled but the tickets used were never checked at a gate or on a train.

That's why we're careful about using the "refund" word

 

[Wolfie]

Just a clarification note. On this forum we are generally very careful not to use the word "refund" when discussing applications for Delay Repay which is the compensation scheme that comes into play when your train is delayed.

Officially, "refunds" apply when either you don't use the ticket at all, or if the disruption was so bad that you abandon the journey.

Train company fraud investigators look hard at those refund applications, because fare-dodgers have been known to apply for refunds after they have actually travelled but the tickets used were never checked at a gate or on a train.

That's why we're careful about using the "refund" word

A very good post. What doesn't help any though is some frontline customer-facing railway staff using the R word when they actually mean delay repay.

 

[glasgowniteowl]

A very good post. What doesn't help any though is some frontline customer-facing railway staff using the R word when they actually mean delay repay.

It's not just the staff, some websites use the refund word as well, below from C2C website

• 60 to 119 minutes, you’re entitled to a full refund of the cost of a Single journey (or the appropriate percentage, based on your Season and Return tickets)

 

[Wolfie]

It's not just the staff, some websites use the refund word as well, below from C2C website

• 60 to 119 minutes, you’re entitled to a full refund of the cost of a Single journey (or the appropriate percentage, based on your Season and Return tickets)

That is deeply and potentially unfairly unhelpful.

 

[Titfield]

It's not just the staff, some websites use the refund word as well, below from C2C website

• 60 to 119 minutes, you’re entitled to a full refund of the cost of a Single journey (or the appropriate percentage, based on your Season and Return tickets)

Yes the problem of the precision of the language used. It never ceases to amaze me how words are bandied around but of one thing you can be sure: when it becomes a matter of ticket validity, revenue protection, customer complaints or it goes legal then the precision of the language used becomes crucial.

 

[northwichcat]

Leaving aside whether you need to prove anything, I suggest it would be far more dfficult to provide evidence of having taken a bus where, even if you could pinpoint the exact bus concerned, the driver would not know you from Adam, than a car journey where the driver would, presumably, be someone you knew who could testify that they did indeed give you a lift home.

Contacless is taken on a lot of buses now, meaning it you use that you at least have a transaction showing you paid a certain amount at a certain time. (Even presuming you throw away tickets as soon as you have completed the journey).

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 7 Apr 2024 ==

It's not just the staff, some websites use the refund word as well, below from C2C website

• 60 to 119 minutes, you’re entitled to a full refund of the cost of a Single journey (or the appropriate percentage, based on your Season and Return tickets)

Giving you 100% of your money back is actually a refund. It's just you must go through Delay Repay if you travelled and arrived late but go down the requesting a refund path if you didn't travel.

 

[Surreytraveller]

It's not just the staff, some websites use the refund word as well, below from C2C website

• 60 to 119 minutes, you’re entitled to a full refund of the cost of a Single journey (or the appropriate percentage, based on your Season and Return tickets)

Presumably, someone accused of such a fraud, would be able to produce that website as a defence

 

[duffield]

On the last point about traveling by car, If you use Google maps and have the location history turned on. It will show dates and times and mode of transport used. So could hopefully be used to disprove train travel.

I use Google maps and its location facilities constantly, and its "mode of transport" unfortunately doesn't really prove or disprove anything, it is just a best (mostly good) guess.

True, often it's deadly accurate even for a complex multi-leg journey. But other times, it can mistake a simple, obvious train journey for a car, a bus, a walk and (on one occasion where there was a large lake nearby), a ferry! A few weeks ago it started wrongly labelling *all* my train journeys as car journeys, then after a few days it went back to being mostly accurate.

I go through and manually correct it, to give a reasonable record of my travels. And as an aside, when I've edited my journey, there doesn't seem to be any way to determine that it's not the "original" journey, as recorded by Google.

The actual location can occasionally be out by 10-20 miles; and it pretty much stops working if you're in low battery mode.

Some of the accuracy no doubt depends on how good your phone is, but it's always going to be guessing, particularly when a train and road journey follow broadly similar routes and take similar times.

 

[robbeech]

Presumably, someone accused of such a fraud, would be able to produce that website as a defence

They may be able to unless a) The website has been changed in the time between the offence and it being used as a defence. b) The railway and court have already made up their mind about the case on the golf course so doesn’t care about any defence.

 

[Jimbob52]

They may be able to unless a) The website has been changed in the time between the offence and it being used as a defence. b) The railway and court have already made up their mind about the case on the golf course so doesn’t care about any defence.

Please provide details of any case where ‘ The railway and court have already made up their mind about the case on the golf course so doesn’t care about any defence.’

 

[Cowley]

I think we’re just starting to get away from what’s actually useful to the OP here, so it’s probably best that we put hold on this and if @familyguy12 would like to update us, please let us know via the report function below.

Thanks everyone