China Railway stated today that since the sale of train tickets for the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holiday travel began on September 23, Railway 12306 has continuously identified and curbed malicious ticket-snatching behavior. It has placed 7.117 million transactions into a slow queue, refused to issue tickets for 1.023 million transactions, and rejected a total of 1.331 million tickets.
12306 uses big data analysis and risk control technologies to accurately identify three types of abnormal behavior: registered accounts frequently making large numbers of ticket purchases for others, payment accounts frequently paying for orders belonging to others, and forged terminal devices mimicking user ticket-purchasing operations. Registered accounts identified as abnormal are placed in a slow queue, displaying a "waiting" prompt during ticket purchase; abnormal payment accounts will display a "ticket purchase failed" message during payment.
12306 emphasized that it has never collaborated with any third-party platform institutions and does not have extra charges such as ticket-snatching acceleration packages, membership fees, or fees for selecting carriage seats. Changes and refunds are processed strictly according to regulations, while passengers' personal information security is protected by law. Purchasing tickets through third-party platforms not only does not increase the success rate but may actually result in slower processing or failed purchases.
As previously reported, in January this year, the Beijing Municipal Administration for Market Regulation handled the nation's first typical case of fake ticket-snatching on platforms, exposing the tricks behind third-party platforms' "acceleration packages." The investigation found that third-party platforms created a false impression of high success rates for "acceleration packages," claiming that purchasing them would result in faster ticket-snatching speeds and higher success rates. In reality, once train tickets were sold out, there were no tickets left to snatch, rendering the acceleration packages ineffective.
Zhang Zhiqiang, head of operations and assurance at the 12306 Technology Center, previously warned that if consumers use third-party platforms to log into their personal 12306 accounts, they face risks such as personal information leaks and failure to receive proper refunds. Third-party platforms store users' account passwords, which could be misused.