Bus Tickets

[Tachyon]

Bus tickets are very easy to counterfeit, and if you make multiple trips in a day the savings quickly add up. Unfortunately I bet if you did it every day after a while they'd start making a big deal over it and check more carefully.

[frog]

Bus tickets are very easy to counterfeit, and if you make multiple trips in a day the savings quickly add up. Unfortunately I bet if you did it every day after a while they'd start making a big deal over it and check more carefully.

I don't know that they would.  Here, bus tickets are simple orange stock paper with non-magnetic ink. They have serial numbers that only tell the sheet they were printed from.  The automatic machines on our buses actually don't have any way to read the tickets or bills you put into them.  I do sort of live in a backwards little province, though.

At least in my situation, bus drivers would have no ability to check the serial nos., so unless they revamped the entire bus system, you can get away with this.  Especially if it's just you doing it, and you don't tell your friends and your friends' friends and their dog about it, you should be good.

That's the main thing, actually.  If you are doing something like this, keep it low key if you want to keep doing it.

[Tachyon]

My province doesn't have any sort of machine really, just a metal box with a lever to dump the money/tickets. The tickets are orange stock paper here too, but they have weird crinkley edges and I'm far too lazy to cut them out that way, at least now. Maybe eventually I'll figure out how to make an edge to cut them out but they change the design around here all the time so it could be a waste of time.

[frog]

My province doesn't have any sort of machine really, just a metal box with a lever to dump the money/tickets. The tickets are orange stock paper here too, but they have weird crinkley edges and I'm far too lazy to cut them out that way, at least now. Maybe eventually I'll figure out how to make an edge to cut them out but they change the design around here all the time so it could be a waste of time.

It's called a perforated edge.  You can pick up a hand-perforator and stock paper at a local crafts store.  Tickets are usually valid for a whole year, so changing perforation--which seems a little odd to me--wouldn't make sense and wouldn't be at all fail-safe.  As well, once the ticket is in the deposit slot, bus drivers probably won't peer through the dirty little window to check the style of perforation.

[rbcp]

Anyone ever hear the Hope keynote where Kevin Mitnick talked about his adventures in bus ticket scamming as a kid?  It was a good speech, but I can't seem to find a link to it.

[Tachyon]

My original plan was use craft scissors like you said but I couldn't find the exact perforation, much as I tried. I had a pretty smart idea of acid-etching my own edge and attaching it, but they've changed the actual design of the tickets several times in 2006 and I lost interest. The reason they changed I think was because the rates kept going up, which was what lead to my gutsy and rebellious vendetta against the system.

[afreak]

When I lived in BC, I used to use a mag stripe-based system to use the busses and trains in Vancouver. The cool thing was that you can buy these cards that are already set to travel within their allowed zones. However, a flaw in the cards was that they contained no set cash value in the mag stripe's data, so if they raised the prices, provided that you have an older unused card, you could buy a 1-zone card for $2.25, and when they raised it to $2.50, the card would still be valid since it has no value.

To make it effective and not to get caught, you'd just use a ticket machine to upgrade the card to a 2 or 3-zone card.

[frog]

My original plan was use craft scissors like you said but I couldn't find the exact perforation, much as I tried. I had a pretty smart idea of acid-etching my own edge and attaching it, but they've changed the actual design of the tickets several times in 2006 and I lost interest. The reason they changed I think was because the rates kept going up, which was what lead to my gutsy and rebellious vendetta against the system.

It would probably take more work and money than just buying bus tickets.  As clever as something might be, it's not a good idea if it's not practical.  If they changed the design several times in a year, then chances are there are still many people using old tickets after they've switched.  It wouldn't be a problem.

[rbcp]

My original plan was use craft scissors like you said but I couldn't find the exact perforation, much as I tried.

I bought a rotary paper cutter from Office Depot that has a regular, circular cutting blade on it.  But you can buy replacement blades for it that cut in different patterns.  One of the patterns is a perforation and it looks just like the perforation you see on anything else.

[Raptor]

damn new fangled technology- our buses have a little scanner that you hold the ticket under, and it makes a happy BEEP-BEEP after It has "authorized" it.

[frog]

damn new fangled technology- our buses have a little scanner that you hold the ticket under, and it makes a happy BEEP-BEEP after It has "authorized" it.

Oh wow. That's Lightmetres beyond our technology. Our ticket acceptors literally are stacked conveyor belts. You could feed twistix through it if you wanted, it has no idea.

Can you get a scan of a bus ticket for us? And do you know anything else about how the scanner works?

[Tachyon]

Conveyor belts?? Holy fuck, ours is a metal box with a latch and a scowling bus driver beside it.

[frog]

Conveyor belts?? Holy fuck, ours is a metal box with a latch and a scowling bus driver beside it.

They recently added these new contraptions from "CentsaBill" to our buses. They include a change counter and a ticket reader.  However, I was doing my thing and asking bus drivers about it and found out that they actually don't work.  One of them even showed me, they machines aren't any more than bolted to the floor.  So essentially, ours is still a metal box with a latch.  Our bus drivers tend to be nice, though.

[gangals]

Our city bus system uses magnetic stripe cards.

[Tachyon]

Magnetic swipe cards should be pretty simple to spoof with a basic card reader and some software, but I hope my city never gets rid of these shitty bus tickets.