On 13/04/2012 10:44, Paul Corfield wrote:

On Fri, 13 Apr 2012 10:31:33 +0100, Clive
wrote:

When I had an apparent Oyster overcharge a couple of weeks ago I went to
a TfL ticket office where they gave me a printout of my Oyster history.
Since I use Oyster infrequently this went back several months, and
showed (in addition to the problem I was then trying to solve) an
unexpected debit for a trip on a route 405 bus last November.

This surprised me, and so when I got home I checked my diary and found
that I had been nowhere near London on that date. In any case since I
have an over-60s bus pass, I never need to use Oyster on a bus in
London. The only explanation I can think of is that some technical
failure got my account charged for a trip actually made on a card owned
by someone else, and that the card's record was updated when I used it
next. This is rather worrying.

I filled in an Oyster claim form online and have just got a reply from
TfL saying that they cannot even do checks on journeys more than 8 weeks
in the past, and that claims can be considered only if they are within
the last 2 weeks. This seems wholly unreasonable, since the printout
from my card clearly shows journeys back many months before.

Since it appears that an Oyster Card account can be debited even when
you don't use it, this also means that everyone with an Oyster Card
really needs to check their journey history at least every two weeks, to
make sure that there have not been any random debits made in their
absence, so they can if necessary put in a claim within TfL's time limit.

Fortunately accounts can be checked on-line (provided you have made at
least one on-line top-up, a rather bizarre restriction) but this is
still a bit of an imposition on the occasional user like me. I guess I
shall just have to remember to do this from now on.

A question - did you hand over your card at the ticket office for them
to provide a printout? The print out should reflect what is on the
*card* and not what may or may not be in the central system.
Transaction data is only held centrally for 8 weeks AIUI whereas card
data is the last 10 transactions and only changes as you use the card
and the oldest data is overwritten.

Do you ever use the 405 bus?

The other thing to note is that the print out from a ticket office only
shows the day and month, *not* the year - so this journey didn't
necessarily happen in November 2011.

(And AFAICS it's simply impossible for 'ghost journeys' to be recorded
on an Oyster card.)