TfL settles disabled Oystercard problem

In RAIL 835‘s The Fare Dealer, I referred to a reader who had paid £300 at Wembley Central for the £5 deposit and adding £10 credit on each of 20 new Oystercards, ready for a party of visitors, only to find all the cards blank on first use.

This was taken up by London TravelWatch and I’m pleased to say Transport for London (TfL) has settled this.

It said it had seen potentially fraudulent Oyster transactions at the ticket vending machines at Wembley and so bulk purchases were ‘disabled’ as part of their fraud prevention measures. It added it was implementing changes to the Oyster system that will allow it to undertake this type of fraud prevention without disabling cards.

TfL paid our reader £100 in compensation, but added: “It was never our intention to cause any embarrassment to you.” I’m not sure how they imagined the deletion of £300-worth of credit would do other than cause embarrassment, but that no doubt complements the generous compensation offered.

TravelWatch told me TfL would prefer people to use contactless credit/debit cards and I was interested to learn that overseas visitors may use them regardless of their bank or home currency.

Contactless is an excellent system and will no doubt replace Oyster in time, once TfL can come up with ways of arranging for discounted fares to work. Probably a majority of those still using Oyster are children, Freedom Pass holders (seniors within Greater London) or those like myself with a railcard added to an Oyster.

Oyster can easily deduct a railcard-discounted fare, but you can’t add a railcard to a contactless bank card, so there will need to be some arrangement for a railcard to match a nominated bank card so TfL can pass the correct charge to the bank.