FRAUD:Trip tolling & ticket swaps

If you run a road 900km (540mi) long with 46 interchanges that tolls by trips you are vulnerable to ticket swap fraud. That’s what the North-South Expressway (NSE) in Malaysia has found. Opened in 1994 it is one of the world’s most beautiful roads traversing rain forests, rice paddy, rubber plantations, threading its way through spectacular mountains and by wide lakes and rivers. It runs from the causeway to Singapore at its southern end past Kuala Lumpur, Penang and other major cities right up to the Thai border. It is basically 2x2-lanes but has considerable lengths with truck passing lanes and in the urban areas is 2x3-lanes.

Most of the NSE was built by a subsidiary of the Malaysian Renong financial group known by its acronym PLUS which has a 30-year concession to toll the road and maintain it.

At the narrowest neck of the Malay peninsula where traffic crosses between Thailand and Malaysia drivers have to swap sides, the northbound traffic going from the ex-British left hand travel to Indo-Chinese/Chinese right hand travel.

But at rest areas south of the border, many truck drivers and other regular patrons do another set of swaps. They swap toll tickets and prepaid magstripe toll cards. If you are driving a truck from Singapore or even KL to Bangkok you’ve got a ticket that if you hand it to the toll collector at the Thai border will set you back say $250 (TRnl guestimate) but if at a rest stop along the way you can find someone with a ticket with an entry registration at Ipoh or Penang well to the north you’ll only be charged say $60 or $30 by the toll collector at the Thai border. A southbound trucker with a load for KL or the Malaysian ports nearby will be delighted to be rid of his ticket with a northern entry registration in return for a ticket with an entry registration at Johor Bharu close by his destination. Each can probably make $150 in the deal.

Talk about trade for mutual benefit!

Indeed it will probably pay someone handsomely to have people hanging around the rest areas brokering toll tickets, matching drivers with an apparent entry registration close to their planned destination point.

Penna pike

Mike Kennedy of the Pennsylvania Turnpike says they have had a ticket swap problem probably since it opened about 60 years ago: “It definitely happens. They do it at the rest areas. Our police are very aware of it and they catch people every now and then. The practice is not flagrant and we don’t think it is a major loss of revenue but it is something you have to keep after. It is like any other form of evasion. You have to make the chance of getting caught and the penalties seem enough to persuade people it isn’t worth trying.”

Truck drivers face a $1,000 fine for a first ticket-swap offense in PA.

Police on the Penna pike do sting operations, Kennedy says, every few years when they hear the problem is on the rise. The majority of the Turnpike trucking customers with established commercial accounts have never been involved in ticket swaps, he says. But the occasional independent cash paying customer, usually an owner-operator, tries it.

eTrans

Daryl Fleming of the new eTrans consulting group says that swap scams are a well-known danger in any toll ticket system. He says tickets can be coded in ways that make swap scams more difficult, but can’t beat the problem completely. Various ‘screens’ can be applied at the payment point to flag likely scam-artists.

On the New York State Thruway in the latest upgrade of their toll collection system the tickets are all encoded with the time of issue of the ticket, and at exit the toll management system calculates a period of probable legitimate travel time from the point of entry. If the actual travel time indicated by the ticket falls outside the probable time, this is immediately displayed on the toll collector’s display and the toll collector is instructed to inquire about the anomaly. If the driver doesn’t have a convincing explanation, the driver is instructed to pull over and the police are called.

Most ticket swap scams involve ticket swaps between vehicles travelling in different directions, so rest centers that serve both directions facilitate the swap scams. The NY State Thruway has two major plazas with overbridges between service/rest areas on either side and these have occasionally been used in small ticket scams.

The New Jersey Turnpike has had big ticket swapping frauds at various times in its history, it is said.

Imaging

There’s now a host of automatic license plate reading and vehicle imaging equipment available most of which is used to make pictures of bolt-throughs to identify them for prosecution. On a ticket facility such imaging can be done at entry and exit points to tie ticket issue to a particular vehicle to see that the ticket presented is the same one issued to the vehicle presenting for toll payment. The most elaborate system would use Toronto-407 type imaging of all non-transponder equipped vehicles at all entries and exits and a matching of the images. The 407 is more than a license plate reading system in that being based on missile nose target matching systems it not only reads the characters but digitizes an image of the rear of the vehicle. That requires high bandwidth communications links and major computing power. But for an adequate deterrent effect partial imaging and ticket matching giving priority to suspect goups seems likely to be far more economical.

Bob Foote, formerly director of research at the Port Authority NY/NJ and a pioneer of many kinds of automated systems says: “The general way to limit the fraud now is to code an ID of the vehicle into the ticket given to the driver at entrance and check the ID of the vehicle on the proferred ticket at exit.” Similarly an electronic toll system can be combined with license plate reads, but he points out that even a complete license plate reading system is not immune. A pair of trucks perhaps of the same small company making runs in different directions can arrange to meet at a toll road rest area and swap not only toll tickets (or transponders) but license plates also — if they are handy with a screwdriver!

A good low-tech way to limit the fraud would be to issue a toll agency sticker (TAS) with a unique number (#) on it large enough to be read from the toll booths, says Foote. The sticker would be designed to come apart with any effort to remove it. (Expiration date stickers are issued by some states on license plates do this.). At entrance the TAS # could be written on the ticket by the toll attendant with indelible ink. At exit the TAS # on the proferred ticket would be compared with the number on the TAS.

All this is a lot of work! But, says Bob Foote, the process could be automated fairly easily, because the TAS # characteristics and placement on the vehicle can be matched to the design of a reader.

Red-handed

Foote suggests segregation of vehicles entering the toll plaza by intended direction and issuing distinct tickets say green for northbound, and red for southbound: “Then if a northbound driver shows up at a northern exit with a ticket obtained by a southbound driver at an entrance just south of the northerly exit, he’ll be caught red-handed.” (Sorry, bad pun!)

During the 1970s Foote urged that toll transponders be encoded with the vehicle identification number (VIN), paint color, owner name and some other ID characteristics — precisely to stop scams. And in those days the idea was that the transponder would be very securely fixed to the vehicle on the underside (for communications via antennas in loops in the pavement.)

But that wasn’t to be. The antennas are overhead and the trannsponders have to be on the windshield. There’s nothing to stop transponder swapping, because the attachment is usually velcro — which makes it ridiculous to call these “automatic vehicle identification,” as some optimists in the industry do. They use the acronym AVI. These things can’t identify a vehicle! All they identify is a toll account number, which may or may not bear some relation to the vehicle carying them.

Of course you can always scrub your ticket system for barriers or multiple point tolls along the road, as the Maine turnpike has recently done. Electronic tolling at highway speed seems to reduce the disadvantages of point tolling as compared to when each point was a barrier or a ramp plaza. (Contacts: Khairuddin Zainal, Gen Mgr PLUS KL fax 60 3 298 9751, Mike Kennedy, Pennsylvania pike 717 939 9551, Daryl Fleming eTrans Group ISIFlem@aol.com www.etransgroup.com Bob Foote bobfoote@tds.net)