Apparently, There’s Some Fraud In Your Network

I worked for a while in the office of a railway company. At the time, the company ran both a long-distance main line and a more local network. My department dealt with delay claims; in the UK, if your train is delayed by more than thirty minutes, you are entitled to some or all of the price of your ticket back. Because long-distance main line tickets can be very expensive, all the delay claims on the main line were checked to make sure they were genuine, but claims on the local network weren’t because the company believed it wasn’t worth it, since any losses due to fraud were likely to be very small.

But then, the policy changed; checks were introduced to the local network, as well. The savings from this amounted to £8,000 in the first week alone! And a man who had appeared to be the unluckiest traveller ever was discovered to have put in for compensation for more delays than there had been on the entire network that year.