How does the Account Heartbeat prevent fraud?

Active tickets can only be used on one device at a time to prevent multiple people from sharing an account and using the same ticket to board a bus. We enforce this by logging the user out of the old device, if they access the ticket on a second. However, if the first device isn’t online we can’t log them out.

Some users will utilise this and access tickets on multiple devices, in order to share the account and use the same ticket multiple times.

The Account Heartbeat reduces the frequency of this kind of fraudulent behaviour by requiring the device to have accessed the internet within a set timeframe, in order to use an active ticket. We initially set the timeframe as 72 hours in order to make sure users acting in good faith were not affected by the anti fraud measures.

Change to the Account Heartbeat timeframe for even better protection against fraud

In order to further reduce the incidence rate of fraudulent use of tickets on multiple devices, we ran a pilot with one of our operators to reduce the timeframe to 8 hours. The outcome was a significant 89% drop in users accessing tickets from multiple devices. In addition to this significant reduction, no customer issues were reported as a result of reducing the timeframe.

As a result of this successful trial, we are rolling this improved anti-fraud measure to all operators.

This will be released on 29th August 2024. For any questions, please contact your Customer Success Manager.