Before Christmas, our Revenue Protection team undertook a two-week block at Waterloo focused on Monday-Thursday travel, to ensure customers arriving at the station were travelling with valid tickets.
The team take a data-led approach to decide what to look out for such as misuse of Railcards or short-faring, where a customer buys a ticket for only a short part of their journey.
Revenue Protection Operations Manager, Renato Dos Santos said: “From January to September there were around 44,000 suspicious tickets bought for journeys from Vauxhall to Waterloo. For this blockade, we are targeting the platforms at Waterloo where we know trains haven’t stopped at Vauxhall, so we can easily identify those without a valid ticket.”
The data can really make a difference and build up a picture of fraud, Senior Revenue Protection Manager Jakob Grun said: “We have great insights from our Commercial Data team, and we also work really closely with the likes of Trainline who can share purchasing history of a customer if we have
reason to believe they have been avoiding paying the correct fare.”
It’s not just the data that helps crack down on fare evaders, the skills of the team make a big difference as well. Revenue Protection Assistant Sam Veitch said: “When we do these blocks we play to each other’s strengths. On our suburban platforms we’ll use the Waterloo and Metro teams who are used to dealing with contactless payments, whereas on the mainline platforms we use a mixture of our Central and Waterloo teams who are more familiar with the issues on those services such as short-fares.”
Of course, not every fare-evader is friendly towards the team, which is where their conflict-management skills help. Sharon McNulty said: “Reading body language is really important. You don’t want to escalate a situation if it isn’t safe and things can change in a split second. Empathy is also important. You don’t know what’s happened to that person before you talk to them, so you always need to adapt to the situation.”
During 2025, the team was featured in the successful Channel 5 show Fare Dodgers, with many of those involved still being asked for selfies. It’s had other impacts too, with some customers owning up to thousands of pounds worth of fare evasion in fear of the repercussions that were highlighted on the programme.
