It was a totally normal Thursday morning when the email landed in my inbox. The words ‘investigating you’ and ‘fraud’ leapt out at me from the screen. The message had been sent by my local train operator and immediately, my blood turned cold.
The warning — from the Revenue Protection Team — explained that they had been digging into my data and believed I had not been paying the full fare on many journeys. They were correct. I’ve been commuting into London from a town under an hour outside of the capital for years, but having recently turned 31, I’ve aged out of the young person’s rail card, which offers a significant discount. Between this, sky-rocketing travel costs (up 5% last year alone, with advance ‘cheap’ tickets up 10% in some areas) and my workplace increasing our mandated office days, my commute costs were swallowing around a quarter of my monthly take-home wages. So, I figured what harm was there in a little workaround?
After all, considering I rarely get a seat on my commute and usually end up sitting on the scratchy carriage carpet, laptop balanced on knees catching up on work (all for the handsome price of £50), the price of a train ticket can feel like a gigantic middle finger from the train operator. By all means, take out your tiny violin, but alongside rent, bills, trying to maintain a social life and save for a flat deposit, seeing so much of my salary going on an essential cost I couldn’t escape was unreal to me.
And for good reason. Analysis from 2024 found UK trains are the most expensive in Europe and despite this, British rail fares still rose by 5.1% in 2025, outpacing both inflation (3.2%) and annual pay growth (around 4.3% for full-time median earnings). All this, set against a backdrop where real wages have only just clawed back to roughly their 2008 levels, after more than a decade of stagnation.
So, I’d been taking a risk. I’d pay £30 for my trip into London in the morning, but each evening, I’d log in to the train company’s app and buy a £3 ticket from the town just one stop away from my own, rather than shelling out the full-whack. If I saw an inspector walking towards me when I was travelling without a ticket, I’d frantically buy one on my phone. Without my knowing, the train company had been quietly logging this and were now, six months on, demanding an explanation. The train operator app had timestamped and geolocated my every move. My every purchase. How could I have been so stupid?
So yes, I had been fiddling the system over the past year, much like multiple others I knew who ditched a big city during the pandemic in search of more affordable housing and who now lived on the outskirts. The return to the office, with the number of days being steadily increased at the whim of CEOs who can afford the £6,500 season ticket, has been brutal.
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That said, a wealthy former HSBC executive, Joseph Molloy, recently made headlines after saving over £5,900 by adopting a similar method to me – of buying tickets at each end of the journey and skipping stops in between – something I learnt even has a name: ‘doughnutting’. Molloy was commuting from a £2 million home and pleaded guilty to fraud by false representation. He was given a suspended 10-month jail sentence, while being ordered to pay £5,000 in compensation to the train company.
A quick Google told me that my fare evasion was also a very serious offence, one which could result in a court appearance, criminal conviction and huge fine, along with having to resign from my job and obtaining a criminal record, making it a struggle to find future employment.
The government’s Department of Transport recently announced it would be cracking down on fare evasion, introducing new changes this year that will mean railcards will be more thoroughly checked. It adds that refund abuse, wherein people try to claim back used tickets that weren’t scanned or stamped, will also be a focus, in a bid to save more than £20 million lost in revenue.
According to theOffice of Rail and Road says “fare evasion costs Britain’s railway hundreds of millions of pounds every year” and claims this lost revenue is part of why train tickets are so steep to begin with, suggesting around 3% of all passengers aren’t paying their way.The number of fare prosecutions on the London Underground hit a six-year high last summer, too.
But with rail fares typically rising every year, and salaries remaining stagnant, is it any wonder the rate of train robbers is soaring?
When Labour took hold of the government and pledged to bring the railways back into public ownership, I felt a flutter of hope that this one costly outgoing might be reduced for young people struggling financially like me. It has not. Despite the government proudly declaring that rail fares have been frozen for 2026, the advanced cheaper tickets I could sometimes book seem to have been scrapped or had the prices pumped – so actually, my personal travel expenses have once again crept up while my wage hasn’t budged.
Sat back at my desk, re-reading the email, the cold in my body turned to hot sweats as I panickedly called a friend (who also commutes from our town to London… and who rarely pays the correct fare) to ask for her advice. “Get a solicitor,” she firmly told me.
After scouring the many busy online forums of panicked fare evaders who’d received identically worded emails to mine, I did contact a solicitor – one whose sole focus is getting fare evaders off the hook. She promptly wrote a letter to the train company explaining I was a first-time offender, that I’d never do it again and that I would pay back every single ticket I’d short-fared on. It turned out, after scouring back through the ticket booking app and cross-referencing it with my diary, I had over 100 offences. I dutifully put them into a spreadsheet and crossed my fingers we could settle out of court. The train company agreed, so long as I paid more than £4,000. I was grateful to avoid a criminal record.
Over a year on, I’m still paying the debt back to a family member who kindly loaned me the sum and I’ve more than learnt my lesson. Even if you think a crime is victimless, and can rationalise it in your head as being ‘harmless’ as it’s against a faceless conglomerate, someone always has to pay for your decision down the line. It’s still not right or acceptable to do.
Whenever I tell people what happened to me, how I got caught and how much I had to pay back, they’re shocked – yet, many confess they also don’t always pay for a train ticket because of the cost, especially when there are stations with open barriers and nobody around to check. Some proudly boast about finding workarounds to extend their 26 to 30 railcards well beyond their 31st birthdays. Others say they occasionally sneakily buy a cheaper child ticket. But these train companies are watching us. So I’m sharing my story as a word of warning to others: getting caught and all of the subsequent anxiety it’s caused was entirely not worth it. See you on the floor of the 7:29AM service on Monday?
