MUMBAI: A tiny difference in font and spacing on a mobile screen has blown the lid off a new railway ticketing scam- a fake version of the RailOne app being used by passengers travelling in Mumbai’s AC locals.
“However in this fake app, the page was completely different. So we started recording the process of booking the ticket from this app. Its homepage offers options for reserved, unreserved and platform tickets, besides eight other services under ‘more offerings’. For suburban tickets, the app provides options for Normal and Season tickets, with users required to select the source and destination stations. The fake application, however, appeared to mimic the ticket-generation process only after the journey details had been entered.
The genuine RailOne app, launched in Mumbai on March 1 this year after replacing the UTS mobile app, is Indian Railways’ all-in-one platform for passenger services.
The passenger said that this is the app that he uses to book train tickets,” Singh said.
The discrepancy was confirmed through the ticket examiner’s Hand Held Terminal, which displays the history of tickets. What initially appeared to be a valid return ticket soon caught his eye: the station names on the mobile ticket did not quite look right. Singh, a commercial cum ticket clerk posted at Lower Parel, noticed that the font and spacing between the boarding and alighting stations were different from those on the official RailOne app. On the ticket showing ‘Virar’ and ‘Churchgate’, even the small dotted line beneath the station names appeared closer than it does on the genuine application. The imitation had another feature designed to make it look convincing – a five-minute reverse countdown at the top, with red-coloured digits, much like the official app. “The station names too were quite close to the edge of the screen which isn’t the case with RailOne. This got me suspicious after which I asked him to go back to the app’s interface from the start. The passenger was taken to Andheri railway station for further enquiry, where railway staff asked him to restart the mobile ticketing application from the beginning. That was when the deception became harder to hide. Instead of opening the familiar RailOne interface, the application landed on a completely different page, allowing the user to directly enter details such as the boarding station, destination, date of journey, distance and number of passengers. It then produced a screen resembling a RailOne ticket and displayed what appeared to be a UTS number. But railway officials found that even this unique code was fake. The QR code at the bottom of the fake RailOne ticket also failed the test: unlike the genuine QR code, it did not display the passenger’s details. The discovery has prompted Western Railway to step up vigilance against counterfeit versions of the mobile ticketing application. “Since this case happened, we have started sensitising our staff to keep watch of the RailOne app. The latest case comes against the backdrop of a sharp rise in passengers being caught travelling improperly in AC locals.
The fraud came to light on June 20 when 27-year-old Western Railway ticket checking staffer Arvind Singh was conducting a routine check for ticketless passengers aboard an AC local from Dadar. Singh, who joined the railways in 2024, alerted a colleague and asked the passenger to deboard the Virar-bound AC local. The passenger was travelling from Churchgate to Virar with his wife and child and had produced what appeared to be an AC return ticket for two passengers, for which he had paid ₹ 460. The number actually belonged to a second-class ticket dated June 18 and had no connection with the ticket purportedly being used for the June 20 journey. Western Railway detected 54,954 such cases between January and July 2026 and recovered more than ₹ 3.16 crore in penalties and excess fare. The number of cases rose from 1,343 in January to 1,195 in February, 1,302 in March and 1,438 in April, before shooting up to 18,305 in May. It remained high in June, at 16,907, and stood at 14,464 in July. The highest recovery during the period was recorded in July, when WR collected ₹ 81.73 lakh, followed by ₹ 62.53 lakh in June.
This is when the passenger became hesitant and I became suspicious about the app’s authenticity,” Singh said. Adequate training is also given and we have informed the Railway Board about the same,” a WR official said.
