Bought out 7,748 Train Tickets and Refunded for 2,000 Won... The Absurd Reason Behind Repeating This

SRT 'Malicious Refund' Cases Increase
Over 15,000 Cases in 4 Years... Total 45 Billion Won
Refunds Next Month to Get Card Company Partnership Discounts

An SRT commuter train is arriving at SRT Suseo Station in Gangnam-gu, Seoul. Photo by Jinhyung Kang aymsdream@

It has been revealed that the malicious refund practice of booking high-speed rail tickets to accumulate card usage records and then canceling them has reached a total of about 15,000 cases over the past four years.

According to the "Malicious Refund Monitoring Status Data" received by Bok Gi-wang, a member of the National Assembly's Land, Infrastructure and Transport Committee from the Democratic Party of Korea, through SR (Suseo Railroad), from January 2021 to August this year, a total of 15,055 malicious refunds of SRT tickets were recorded. A total of 9,482 people issued 896,687 tickets (94.6 tickets per person) and then refunded them. The amount involved was 45.01973 billion KRW.

Malicious refund of tickets refers to the act of purchasing a large number of tickets and then refunding them the following month. This is mainly done to increase the payment amount to meet the discount criteria affiliated with credit card companies. While group tickets impose a minimum penalty fee depending on the number of people, general tickets can be refunded free of charge up to one day before departure, which is exploited in this case. SR considers a booking of 10 or more tickets at once as a group ticket booking, but it is difficult to impose sanctions on non-member bookings.

Highest cumulative issuance amount 579.5 million KRW... Cancellation fee only 2,000 KRW

Passengers boarding the Jeolla Line at SRT Suseo Station in Gangnam-gu, Seoul. Photo by Jang Jin-hyeong aymsdream@

Looking at the issuance and refund details per malicious refunder, among the total 9,482 malicious refunders, 43 individuals had a cumulative issuance amount exceeding 100 million KRW. Among them, the malicious refunder with the highest cumulative issuance amount of 579.5 million KRW was found to have purchased and returned 7,748 tickets over 21 occasions in the past four years. In this process, the cancellation fee he paid was only 2,000 KRW. There was also a case where 4,610 tickets were purchased for 319 million KRW at once and returned without any fee.

During the investigation period, the cancellation fees collected by SR from malicious refunders amounted to 10.29 million KRW, which accounted for only 0.23% of the total refund amount. SR stated, "Since February, we have strengthened the criteria by lowering the amount threshold for classifying malicious refunders from 5 million KRW to 1 million KRW."

Assemblyman Bok said, "We will review and promote amendments to related laws such as the Railroad Business Act to quickly prevent damage to honest SRT users." He added, "Due to insufficient systems, unfair acts by some have caused continuous damage to honest citizens. We will strive to discover similar cases, improve the system, and push for necessary legal amendments so that such cases are not neglected."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.