A passenger has hit out at her ‘disgusting’ treatment after being taken to court by a rail firm for over £2,000 over an ‘innocent mistake’.
Adedoyin Ogunekun had dropped off her car in West Ruislip before commuting to London Marylebone when she boarded a train without touching in her Oyster card.
Having realised her mistake when she arrived, she attempted to pay the fare, which is usually around £5 for a peak journey, but was instead sent what operators call a Travel Incident Notice (TIN) informing her of their intention to prosecute her for ‘deliberating’ evading the cost of a ticket.
Six months later, the rail company agreed to a settlement of £308 – 5,714% more than the correct fare would have been, and over 3000% more than the error cost Chiltern Railways, at £8.60, according to documents submitted to the court.
Ms Ogunekun said when she informed a member of Chiltern Railways staff that she had forgotten to touch her card in, he ‘interrogated’ her on her origin.
She said she found his behaviour ‘triggering’.
She explained: ‘He was like ‘Where are you coming from?”. I was sleep deprived. He just started full-on interrogating me.’
‘He was telling me ‘You’re about to get a £1,000 fine’. I called them a couple of days later to complain. But rather than fix my complaint they decided to go full steam ahead.
Adedoyin Ogunekun (pictured) was taken to court by a rail firm for an ‘innocent mistake’ costing around £5.60
CCTV of Ms Ogunekun speaking to station staff at Marylebone station
She pleaded not guilty at an initial hearing in January 2024.
‘They sent me a summons to court just before Christmas which completely ruined the festive season for me’, she said.
‘This ticket, if I’d touched my oyster it would have been £5.60.’
She said she would have opted to settle then, but the prosecution was not willing to settle at case management and insisted it was going to trial.
‘They did as much as they can to quickly fast track this through to the courts’, she said.
‘There are just a number of things in this whole process I just can’t believe.’
Submissions to the court seen by MailOnline claim that Ms Ogunekun would have ‘avoided the correct rail fare’ had she not been questioned by staff at Marylebone, while admitting that she had approached station guards when she arrived to inform them she hadn’t tapped in.
Notices at stations, including West Ruislip, warn passengers who fail to produce a valid ticket for their journey are liable for a penalty fare of ‘at least £100’.
On its website, Chiltern Railways say that passengers stopped by officers may be offered the opportunity to purchase a new ticket, be issued with a penalty fare notice (PFN) or reported to its Economic Crime & Fraud Unit.
And while Ms Ogunekun was explaining her case to staff, CCTV footage shows another man tail a passenger through the ticket barriers without scanning his card before rushing to a train, in sight of officers.
The clip also also shows another man who appears to arrive off a train and be able to buy a ticket at the office for his journey before clearing the barriers and leaving the station.
Ms Ogunekun was also accused of being ‘aggressive’ and swearing at staff members, which she denies.
She says the company tried to ‘racially profile’ her, pointing out details in their evidence relating to her physical appearance.
She said: ‘They picked out that I had dreads [hair]. I actually had twists at the time. They profiled me.’
Chiltern Railways hired independent criminal prosecutor Michael Keeber to handle Ms Ogunekun’s case on behalf of Transport Investigations Limited (TIL), a ‘revenue protection and prosecution service’ for train operators.
Calling him ‘unruly’ and a ‘bully’, Ms Ogunekun said that the lawyer increased the amount he demanded the longer he was in court, so that costs mounted into thousands of pounds.
Mr Keeber applied for a total of £1,050 or £261 an hour for four hours reviewing the case, in addition to £269 for pre-trial preparation and time in court and £140 in travel expenses.
He intended to call three witnesses at £200 each for a total of £600 – paid to the rail firm to ‘cover their costs and the cost of covering the missing member of staff’.
In an application for the award of costs, the total amount submitted was £2,371.
Ms Ogunekun eventually settled for a fee of £308 after deciding not to return to court for a subsequent hearing in February.
‘We got to trial and then they wrote to me and said, we are willing to give you an administrative disposer of £300 plus the ticket price’, she said. ‘For my own mental health sanity, I just paid it.’
She added: ‘For me it was the levels they went. They freeze framed images of the video footage of me pointing to him to show the level of aggression.’
‘There are so many people who go to court and get bullied into pleading guilty for something so trivial. It’s human error.
‘It’s the levels that they went to try to rip apart my character. This was a whole year of this. It was hell.’
‘They did as much as they could to quickly fast track this through to the courts. There are just a number of things in this whole process I just can’t believe.’
She added that Mr Keeber’s quoted costs to find her personal details and investigate the case were excessive, given that she had already provided them to Chiltern Railways when she lodged a complaint about their staff member’s conduct.
‘The prosecutor said he went to extensive lengths to find my details. He didn’t. I made a complaint so they had my details’, she said.
‘He’s just got so much time on his hands’, she said of Mr Keeber. ‘He literally sat in court all day drinking copious amounts of coffee and eating sandwiches for nothing. It was just so embarrassing.
‘He even came out and spoke next to me to the security guard saying “it’s so ridiculous when people jump on the trains and they come here and plead not guilty”.
‘It was all part of his bully boy tactics. The duty solicitor was like “he’s well known here”.’
Chiltern Railways said it was committed to ‘pursuing’ passengers who evade fares (file photo)
The CCTV footage of Ms Ogunekun’s dispute also showed people breaking the rules as she was speaking to staff. The man in the green jacket appears to tail the passenger in front of him through the barriers, avoiding touching in his card and paying the fare
Ms Ogunekun, who was an admissions manager at a university, lives in High Wycombe but usually parks in West Ruislip to travel on the Central Line for work, a journey she has made ‘two or three times a week’ for the past 11 years.
On this occasion she ended up on a national rail service after narrowly missing an underground train.
Rail companies have recently started taking a far tougher stance against passengers with invalid tickets.
James Constable, a lawyer specialising in fare evasions at Ellis Jones Solicitors, said that the firm had seen a ‘huge increase’ in prosecutions being taken out against passengers by rail operators.
He said: ‘We’re finding recently that a lot of people are being sent these letters, because some people are using railcards or not purchasing the whole ticket that they require.
‘Train companies are investing an awful lot of money into actually looking back at all of the journeys that person has taken and then putting together spreadsheets of journeys that they’ve not paid for.’
He said that he is often able to agree a reduced fine with the company rather than having a conviction which can have ‘a huge impact on someone’s life’.
‘Even first time offenders are being sent these letters’, he continued. ‘I don’t know whether it’s a way of train companies trying to scare people… as a deterrent.
‘We have seen a huge increase over the last year. It’s not just Chiltern Railways or TfL. We are getting enquiries most days.’
He added that rail firms were making use of a legal loophole that allows them to pursue people who make one-off innocent mistakes in the same way as repeat offenders.
‘The issue is that people who are making genuine mistakes and people who are intentionally evading payment are being treated exactly the same way’, he said.
‘Fare evasion is a strict liability offence. It doesn’t matter if the person intended to evade paying or it was an innocent mistake. As long as the network can show that it’s not a valid ticket, the intention doesn’t even get looked into.
‘It’s always best to seek legal advice and there could be a way of potentially avoiding court and a conviction, and potentially a way of reducing costs.’
A spokesperson for Chiltern Railways said: ‘To ensure fairness for the vast majority of customers who board our services with a valid ticket, we are committed to pursuing those who don’t.
‘Every individual circumstance of fare evasion is looked at on a case-by-case basis and investigated at the time a penalty fare or notice of prosecution is issued and before further action is considered.’
Transport Investigations Limited said it was not at liberty to comment on any cases, for which it acts on behalf of rail companies.
Mr Keeber told MailOnline that lawyers don’t expect to get the full amount they apply for in court costs and strongly denied that his behaviour was intimidatory in any way.