MetroCard (New York City) - Fraud and Scams

Fraud and Scams

The MetroCard system is susceptible to various types of frauds, perpetrated by clever con artists. Usually these frauds involve the con artist preventing or dissuading the commuter from using his or her own MetroCard, and then charging the commuter for entry to the system (entry is gained by a method that costs the con artist nothing).

One instance would be for the con artist to deliberately jam a MetroCard vending machine in a station (e.g. with chewing gum), and then wait for somebody to try buying a new card just as a train is approaching. As the innocent customer discovers that the machine is broken, the con artist offers to swipe the rider through the turnstile on their own card in return for $2.25 (the same as the regular fare). If the rider accepts, the con artist swipes their altered or stolen card, and lets the rider go through the turnstile. The rider comes out even (they lost $2.25 but got a ride out of it) or slightly behind (if he or she was counting on getting a discount), the con artist makes $2.25, and the MTA loses a fare (plus the cost of fixing the damaged vending machine). This scam is often run by a team of 2 or more people, with one person working the turnstile and the others acting as lookouts.

Also, Metrocard Vending Machines are programmed to disable the bill or coin acceptor after a series of rejected bills or coins, which can result in a row of MVMs all saying "No Bills" or "No Coins".

If a con artist is not using a stolen or broken card, he or she can use an array of unlimited cards. Multiple cards are needed because of the 18-minute delay between each swipe at the same station. Using unlimited cards, a con artist is able to sell rides for $1 instead of $2.

A report from New York State Senator Martin J. Golden claims this scam is costing the MTA $260,000 a year, and some con artists are making up to $800 a day executing it.

All aspects of this scam have been recently prohibited by MTA policy and a New York State law. It is now a crime to do any of these things:

• deface a MetroCard
• sell a swipe (although selling the cards themselves is allowed)
• enter the system without properly paying a fare.

Some con artists will approach a tourist having trouble with the swiping of the card, and pretend to be helpful, but will use a sleight-of-hand trick to switch the tourist's MetroCard with one having little or no value.

The introduction of MetroCards did eliminate one class of criminals. When the NYC subway still used tokens, token suckers would steal tokens by jamming turnstile coin slots, waiting for unsuspecting passengers to deposit tokens (only to discover that the turnstile did not work), then returning to suck out the token. The retirement of tokens in 2003 put the token suckers out of commission, or, at the very least, forced them to find new ways of scamming the system (see above).

The MetroCard does have a magnetic stripe, but both the track offsets and the encoding differ from standard Magstripe cards. It's a proprietary format developed by the contractor Cubic. Off-the-shelf reader/writers for the standard cards are useless, and even hypothetically could work only with both physical and software modification. Some have had partial success decoding it using audio tape recorder heads, laptop sound cards, and custom Linux software.