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CIT hosts COLPOFER Fraud/Ticket Forgery group meeting in Bern, Switzerland
CIT hosts COLPOFER Fraud/Ticket Forgery group meeting in Bern, Switzerland
Current cases of ticket forgery, the management of paper tickets and the revision of UIC Leaflets 361/914 were some of the highlights of the last meeting of the COLPOFER Fraud/Ticket Forgery group, which took place on 13 and 14 November 2024 at CIT headquarters in Bern and Worb in Switzerland and was chaired by Carla Zaffiro from FS Security (Italy).
On the first day of the meeting, which took place at CIT headquarters in Bern, Vincenzo Capraro from FS Security gave an overview of the working group's activities in 2024, followed by a presentation by Jan Vavra from CIT on the revision of UIC Leaflets 361/914, which are to be merged into a single IRS standard entitled ‘Distribution obligations and responsibilities’. The second part of the session was devoted to a plenary discussion, which included an overview of fraud cases in various railway companies. The issue of filming of employees by passengers (data protection and security issues) was also discussed. The first day of the meeting closed with two presentations by David Sarfati from UIC on eTCD possibilities for ticket control and fraud detection and by Kurt de Vriendt, who presented the latest developments in the field of barcodes and ticket security.
On the second day, CIT organised an excursion to Worb with a technical tour of the Aeschbacher printing company, where Managing Director Thomas Aeschbacher demonstrated the production of tickets with the CIT Security Background and a new, in-house developed software for tracking the ticket, which is important for stock control management. The participants were not only able to follow the current production of the modern paper ticket but were also taken back in time when they saw the production of Edmondson railway tickets on one of the oldest Swiss ticket printing machines still in operation from the beginning of the last century.
About COLPOFER and cooperation with CIT
COLPOFER stands for “Collaboration des Services de police ferroviaire et de sécurité” (Cooperation between Railway Police and Security Services) and was founded in 1980 as an association under the UIC umbrella. COLPOFER’s objective is to foster a joint initiative against crime on railway premises. COLPOFER website: www.colpofer.org
CIT works closely with the Fraud and Ticket Forgery Working Group which was set up in 2002. The group runs a network to exchange data on forgeries and cases of fraud using tickets with the (forged or genuine) CIT 2012 security background. One of the key tasks of the working group is making staff involved in sales, checking and manufacture of tickets aware of the problems and training them in how to address them.