No luck in empty seats: how resellers steal railroad tickets
Recently, the Prosecutor's Office, together with carriers, has been actively engaged in the problem of the shortage of railroad tickets, which is artificially created by resellers: over the past six months, several thousand tickets worth tens of millions of rubles have been put back into circulation. For this purpose, a large-scale cleanup of fake accounts has to be organized. How ticket speculators work and how to fight the shortage of seats on trains - in the material "Izvestia".
Where tickets disappear
The prosecutor's office is intervening in the situation with the artificial shortage of railroad tickets, created by resellers. Last week, this work led to the return of 2 thousand railroad tickets worth more than Br9 million.
A similar situation occurred in thesummer - then, after numerous complaints from passengers who could not buy tickets for southbound trains, the Moscow Interregional Transport Prosecutor's Office blocked more than 30 fake accounts, removed from publication 20 advertisements of speculators, and about 5 thousand tickets for southbound trains for the amount of 14 million rubles were returned to circulation.
- Speculators and mass bookers "vacuum cleaner up" offers for the most popular destinations and dates and create additional deficit. They work extremely actively, - explained to "Izvestia" vice-president of PCT, general director of the legal agency "Persona Grata" Georgy Mokhov.
The information was also confirmed to Izvestia by the carriers, where, however, they emphasized that the activities of speculators, as a rule, do not lead to a global shortage of tickets, and after the intervention of the Prosecutor General's Office such illegal activities are suppressed.
According to Georgy Mokhov, as part of the fight against speculators, carrier companies block personal accounts and accounts of intermediaries, including for the use of various bots and online booking programs.
- Moreover, quite respectable travel companies, which book tours at group rates and look suspicious in the eyes of Russian Railways structures, often fall under the crush," the expert said. - The more online booking systems with the use of neural networks develop, the more difficult it is to distinguish and calculate the attackers. In addition, clone sites appear from time to time, and the average consumer does not even know from whom he is booking a ticket. It is good if the transportation at all will be just at an inflated price, but they can simply steal money and personal data.
How railroad speculators work
On the first day of the sale of tickets for summer trains, users often notice how seats disappear literally before their eyes. This often means that bots are working on the carrier's website.
- Resellers use automated programs to buy tickets en masse as soon as they appear. Then they sell them at inflated prices through third-party services," Olga Gogaladze, an economist and expert on financial markets, explained to Izvestia.
The Department of Rospotrebnadzor for Railway Transport explained that speculators buy up the most popular tickets on fictitious names with the help of special scripts at the moment of opening of sales. The purchase takes place in a fraction of a second - a person will not even have time to choose a seat during this time.
And the creation of such bots is not such a complicated matter. On the web you can find a story of how one of the residents of southern Russia, tired of the constant lack of tickets to Moscow, created a bot to "fish out" tickets for his own convenience. Now it no longer works: the carrier company found a way to block it as suspicious.
In order to resell a ticket, speculators place ads on the Web, take the passport data of the buyer, issue a refund and at the moment the ticket enters the system, immediately buy it in the name of the customer. The markup can be up to 100% of the real cost of the ticket.
Georgy Mokhov explains: a person usually realizes that he is buying a ticket from a speculator and pays extra for the "service", but still goes for it, because there is simply no other way to get on the right train.
How speculators are fought
Andrei Makarov, a senior researcher at the Center for Spatial Economics of the Presidential Academy, notes that the rule when a ticket goes back on sale not immediately, but with a wait of several hours will help to fight such schemes. This will make it difficult for the speculator to reissue to a new passenger.
Now carriers already use this technique: the ticket is returned to sale for an indefinite period of time - from a couple of hours to several days. However, this, however, has made life more difficult for real buyers, who often surrender tickets in order to immediately reissue them, for example, to another relative.
-Another way is to introduce a waiting list, so that the information about the appearance of the surrendered ticket could be seen by real buyers," Makarov added. This method was also recommended to carriers by the prosecutor's office. In fact, here a wedge is being driven out by a wedge - carriers started to fight with bots of fraudsters with their own bots, which work with real customers on real requests.
Alexander Preobrazhensky, senior lecturer of the Department of Management in the Hospitality Industry at the Presidential Academy and head of the Professional Commission of the Moscow Association of Travel Agencies (MATA), notes that with the emergence of digital services it is becoming increasingly difficult for speculators. According to him, the speculation segment has now passed from private hands to various companies.
- "There are not so many of them, as the lot of tickets bought out must number in hundreds, or even thousands, so to identify and control such companies is a feasible task," he told Izvestia. - This is achieved by monitoring the sales of the redeemed block of tickets, and in the case of outright speculation, the activities of such violators are usually suppressed.
Georgy Mokhov notes that in air transportation such problems are much less: it is more difficult for resellers to work, because there are many more suppliers of tickets in aviation.
Why there are so few tickets for the New Year
However, carriers and experts emphasize that the shortage of tickets is not directly related to resellers - they only aggravate the situation.
Georgy Mokhov emphasizes that the reasons are, firstly, the lack of additional trains and destinations, secondly, the increased demand for peak dates, and thirdly, the closure of key airports in the southern direction.
-The deficit can be fought only by increasing the supply - additional flights, trains, increasing the frequency and capacity of transportation, - said Georgy Mokhov. - This is an extremely difficult, costly and on some directions practically unsolvable task. There will still be a deficit in the period of high demand: on holidays, in the summer period and on popular destinations. Carriers are trying to respond quickly and unload the direction with additional flights and trains, but it does not always work out.
And the vice-president of ATOR Sergey Romashkin emphasizes that railroad transportation is not just lagging behind the sharp increase in demand for domestic tourism - in some directions the railroad has objectively reached the limit of capacity.
- It is easy to launch an additional airplane, if there is one: the sky is free. But to put additional cars or a train is very difficult simply because it is a strictly limited system," he told Izvestia. - That is why it is necessary to globally increase the construction of new railroads and at the same time increase the speed of tourist delivery. This is especially relevant for the southern direction.
Sergey Romashkin adds that recently there has been a trend of domestic tourists switching to private cars - people are not ready to pay a lot of money for plane or train tickets, especially if they go on vacation with the whole family.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
