I'd largely repeat what I said in the original thread:
I sometimes sit on the other side of the table in my day job. I have the same qualification in investigative practice that the TOC senior prosecution bods have. I’m very definitely not a lawyer but I’m also not quite as green as I am cabbage-looking.
Responding to the correspondence doesn’t make it go away. Answers beget more questions. The TOC don’t have proof, they have a hypothesis. If you ignore them they’re effectively shouting into the abyss. They’ll move on to softer targets.
We’ve seen how this works in this case. The emails have gone from fairly generic questions about journeys to the prosecution team now sending the OP a spreadsheet and demanding that they justify line-by-line every ticket that they have ever bought. Every time the OP has answered a question they’ve had a further question back to them. This makes sense from an investigative point of view- they’re trying to catch the OP in a lie.
Look at the first letter. It doesn’t even say what journeys they find suspicious or why, just that they find some suspicious, with a veiled threat about how it might look bad in court later if they don’t reply.
The last bit is actually nonsense: the PACE caution is “it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court.” I’ve bolded the important bit. If they don’t ask the specifics then they can’t use a non-response against you later. The training for the qualification I hold makes this very clear, and highlights that best practice to give the interviewee enough information in advance for them to know what they’re being asked about. It is interesting that the TOCs don’t follow this advice with their initial correspondence.
My view has long been that the TOC prosecution/fraud teams should be stating in their initial correspondence what they think the issue is. Very few do. I don’t have much time for investigators ignoring best practice. The fact they ignore best practice so brazenly tells me all I need to know.
I can understand why, though. The use of vague and open questioning makes some sense. It is human nature to attempt to ‘fill in the blanks,’ and the result of that is that people either deliberately or inadvertently admit something, or they tell an untruth which they then can’t walk back from. But it’s simply not fair and that- more than anything- demonstrates that the TOC staff are not impartial investigators and that they are only acting in the best interests of the TOC. And that, in turn, demonstrates that there is rarely, if ever, any advantage in engaging.
At the risk of re-hashing an old argument, I simply don't see how the TOCs actually have the legal right under the Data Protection Act to access this information unless they stop someone for suspected fare evasion.
I presume that they use legitimate interest as their basis for processing this data (although they could argue 'prevention of crime' but that's a bit more controversial), but in order to process under that basis it has to be proportionate and balanced. I don't see how a massive data trawl can be seen as either proportionate or balanced between the legitimate interests of the retailer and the operator and the data protection rights of the customer.
Whilst tickets between a common short-faring station pair may be used illegitimately, and for some station pairs it's a safe bet that most of them will be used illegitimately, I don't see how it could be seen as proportionate to assume that all tickets bought between common short-faring station pair are illegitimate. If I tried to justify a similar massive data trawl in my day job my Data Protection Officer would laugh at me.
Sadly I don't think the people in receipt of these emails will be equipped to report them to the Information Commissioner and, even more sadly, I don't think that the Information Commissioner would have the appetite to find against the TOCs.
I also really don't like the generic emails they send to people. When I got my investigation qualification I was taught that it is best practice to give the interviewee enough information to know what they are being accused of. The TOC staff have the same qualification, taught by the same company. I wouldn't expect a TOC to tell the recipient everything, of course not. But the opening email should give some idea of what they're being accused of:
we see you're buying a lot of tickets between Wembley Stadium and Marylebone, would you like to tell us why? It might actually make a few more people bite, to be quite honest:
we can see what you're up to is a powerful message, far more powerful than some generic nonsense about fraud.
