On Aug 9, 9:31*am, MIG wrote:

On 9 Aug, 00:25, Mizter T wrote:

On Aug 9, 12:06*am, "Peter Smyth" wrote:
[snip]
The story is not clear about exactly what is happening. It could be that
people are being charged £10 for £5 of credit (which would be a serious
fault). Or it could be people are pressing the wrong button on the
machine by mistake and buying £10 of credit when they actually only
wanted £5.

Without any further information, it's hard to get a handle on what
this story might be about.

I do just wonder whether it is our old friend, the Oyster out-of-
station-interchange maximum journey time-out issue though... (no, I
can't bear to explain it again!).-

The TV was on in the background, so I should have concentrated better,
but I couldn't work out whether the story was about being overcharged
when topping up or being overcharged for journeys. *I suspect the
latter reported as if the former, by people who have a vague idea of
"buying tickets" at a particular price and can't interpret
"overcharge" in any other way.

Having just looked at the BBC article again it does appear to be an
issue about topping up at the ticket machines - these excepts are
fairly clear in suggesting that:

---quote---
The information also shows there have been 2,421 complaints in 2010
about being double charged when adding credit to the electronic travel
smartcard.
[snip]
Shashi Verna, from TfL, said: "We monitor the system continuously to
make sure the problems are not becoming bigger, and there is no
evidence they are becoming bigger.

"But we constantly check the screens on ticket machines and how the
ticket machines are set up to minimise these problems."
---/quote---

I did wonder whether there was any way in which auto-topup could
somehow have been muddled up with this, e.g. people getting hit with
the max fare charge 'double whammy' have auto-topup enabled, but that
doesn't really make much sense as they would only be topped up once
when their PAYG balance fell below £5 and their nominated card would
only be charged once - the except above is pretty clear in suggesting
that there's been an issue with the actual ticket machines.

So whilst I appreciate that various different issues can get muddled
together inadvertently, it doesn't appear to be a case of that
happening in this instance (hence our old friend the Oyster OSI
maximum journey time-out issue hasn't come out to play here!).