I have been using my card on TfL and National Rail in London. I have now been subject to two on-board revenue checks and the card has failed on both occasions. Despite having properly touched in with the card on both occasions, the card fails the on-board checks and gives an error on the inspector’s device. The card works fine at all ticket barriers. On both occasions the revenue inspectors have been fine about it but people could easily start getting penalty fares (or worse) if they are not believed. This should be addressed if at all possible.
Having talked with a friend of a friend working at TfL, Mondo is far from the only card that fails the offline check with the handheld readers. They are pretty used to it and as long as you’re nice about it, you’re incredibly unlikely to be fined. Any fine you are given can be quickly resolved when checked against the back end service.
Don’t take this as confirmed but word is that the way the check is performed will be changing to better support the wide range of cards they deal with sometime soon™.
It’s worth pointing out that with any contactless cards (not Oyster), the Revenue Inspectors can’t see if you have touched in on the Journey. Their checking devices are not online. For Oyster the touch in is recorded on the card but for contactless it’s stored in the cloud.
Revenue Inspectors on tube/train/tram/DLR will touch your card on their reader. At the end of the day the readers are downloaded and the system checks your touch ins/outs then. If you hadn’t touched in they will apply the fine/max fare to your contactless card.
If your card can’t be registered on the Revenue Inspectors pad, then they can’t add the fine automatically. They could produce a manual fine there and then, but I’m yet to hear of this happening. You’d be able to contest the fine using the details on your online account.
On buses they can get a printout from the driver of all card numbers that have touched in. They use this to check your card number.
Morning. Apologies for starting another thread as I know there is one about this already.
I use my card to tap in and today I got stopped by a ticket inspector. I can report that his machine recognised it as having tapped in.
Thanks for reporting this but if there’s already an existing topic for an issue, there’s no need to create another. Keeping all of the discussion in one place helps others find the issue & potential resolutions / updates that the problem’s solved so I’ve moved your post here.
