Fare Dodging

[mushroom25]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3006866/Lawyer-faces-jail-scam-avoid-23-000-rail-fares.html#comments

Fare dodgers are 10 a penny, just read through the regional press in any of the big cities - this report made national press because of the scale.

I've posted this not because of the story, but because of the comments following it, many of which take the attitude that train companies - and their shareholders - are robbing so-and-sos and deserve to be fleeced by Joe Public.

does a perceived "public wrong" justify the taking of unilateral illegal action?

[jno]

that's not why he did it, though, he did it to get cheap travel. Still, it's clear many people resent their treatment by rail companies, most of which are monopolies that can do much as they please (though it won't make any difference to the sentence).

[andy-hughes]

No.

The argument that 'they can afford it' could be ascribed to any large organisation.

If the same man had shoplifted a weeks groceries from Tesco for a few years on the basis that they are a multi-national outlet, would people sympethise?

It's easy to try and excuse such theft - and that is what it is - by saying that the company involved make massive profits - which is true, but it overlooks their similarly massive costs as well.

Another argument is the 'inefficiency' of the system, but again, that does not justify theft from it - if it did, we could all withhold our Council Tax tomorrow!

So no, long-term deliberate theft is not excusable, especially when, as the media took pains to point out, the culprit is hardly short of the money.

And no, it does not mean it's OK for Joe Public to jump on the band waggon - because theft is theft, it doesn't have degrees of mitigation.

[jno]

that soundsa as if it might have happened here, divebuddy - not exactly, but he fiddled with his photocard somehow.

[Jackdaw33]

There was a programme about this a few years ago. The scam was that the person travelled from a zone 2 station to another zone two station via zone one. Zone one travel is very expensive, so, having only a zone two card his scam was to touch in with his Oystercard then lean over the barrier and touch out. On arrival at his destination he would repeat the trick. he was caught by a random ticket check. As all transactions with this card are recorded by computer it appeared that he had been doing this for ages so he was denied the opportunity of paying a penalty fare and was prosecuted. He went to prison.

[dave50]

I would have thought sending him to jail is a bit harsh when you hear of violent thugs beating someone up in the street getting away with a suspended sentence.

[mushroom25]

he had an oyster card which, joining at Haddenham & Thame, he couldn't touch in. when he gets to marylebone he touches out but as the system doesn't know where he joined, he charges him the maximum daily cap. that's fine for him, because it's less than half the single fare from Haddenham & Thame. if he presented his oyster card to an inspector, the inspector would have read it and seen there was no touch-in. he could have claimed to have forgotten (there are no gates at Wembley Stadium station) but his oyster travel history (easily retrievable) would have revealed he had something of a history of forgetting.....

[andy-hughes]

dave - //I would have thought sending him to jail is a bit harsh when you hear of violent thugs beating someone up in the street getting away with a suspended sentence. //

That is not how legal process works.

You cannot mitigate one crime by weighing its perceived seriousness against another.

I received a speeding fine last week - I can't ask to be let off on the basis that other people exceed the limit more than I did, or that drunk drivers kill people daily - if that was the system, then the law would collapse over night.

[granny grump]

Apparently he was cautioned for the same offence in 2010. He obviously didn't learn from the caution and continued to break the law

[mikey4444]

He is just a thief, no more or less.

I was a BT witness, in a Magistrates Court, about 25 years ago. A few of our telephone boxes had been broken into, for the cash. In all, the cash amounted to about £200 but the damage caused to the structures cost us £1000's to put right.

I had to appear before the Court on behalf of BT. The defence chap, a bit of a Mr Toad, with a doubled-barreled name like Pugh-Jones, or Jenkins-Lewis, said that £200 didn't seem such a lot of money to a big wealthy company like BT.

I replied that I expected he was not short of a bob or two either, but if I leaned over and cut his tied in half, I don't expect he would be very pleased, would he ?

The Chairman of the Bench snorted a bit and asked me not to be flippant, but there was a ripple of giggles around the Court !

[jno]

divebuddy's right: disproportionate sentencing regimes bring the law into disrepute. People who are more upset about pensioners being robbed than about the railways being defrauded are being perfectly reasonable.