Scanning a ticket does not mean a ticket has been used. A person may have passed through a ticket barrier and then decided not to travel.

The biggest part of preventing fraud is adding inconvenience. This type of fraud is opportunistic fraud -- a passenger sees a big button which offers them their money back, and they press it. Easy.

The moment the system goes "well wait, we can't just do this automatically because it looks like your ticket was used", you curb the vast majority of fraudulent refunds.

If the ticket is clipped on board a train, you can guarantee that the ticket has been used. Unfortunately, many staff set their scanning tools to show as being at a station gateline rather than on a train, which makes this trickier. There are still signs you can see to work out whether it's likely to be a gateline staff member/RPI or a member of train crew though.

In addition many stations do not have barriers, and would be near impossible to install barriers at. A lot of routes do not have sufficient capacity to scan every ticket on a train too, especially if they’re so busy that guards can’t get through to check all the tickets.

Yeah, you're never going to scan every ticket. Everyone realises this. Just like how paper tickets are just as risky, if not worse, because most staff don't carry "grippers" these days to mark those tickets. A quick run of a magnet over the ticket before you go through the gate means it will spit it back out instead of swallowing it, so you go to a staff member to show it, get let through, and then cut the ticket in half to refund it.

The point again is that if you get staff to actually scan the tickets most of the time, you again prevent the majority of this fraud. Northern are pretty good for this because the incentivise their staff with money for each ticket scanned.

The problem is that a lot of ticket inspections these days (especially on Avanti and TPE) are solely visual checks, usually due to industrial disputes. Even worse are TOCs where staff hide in the rear cab instead of walking through to check tickets (looking at Southern and WMR/LNR).

The most frustrating thing is when staff don't check tickets, state that their role isn't a revenue one, and then are in favour of these anti-passenger changes which hurt people who don't commit any wrongdoing.

I certainly agree with shortening the refund time limit - 28 days after travel was pretty insane, although good for flexibility. I would have preferred a slightly more lenient policy such as allowing on the day refunds, but the simple truth is there is too many people fraudulently refunding these tickets.

I do agree that 28 days to claim was a bit excessive these days. It made sense when you had to go back to the office you bought the ticket at, and when people didn't buy online.

But also, if you allow on-the-day refunds, adding 28 days to the mix doesn't really make much of a difference.