January 1, 2026
Ticketgate, but make it Marx#
All my Deutschlandtickets gone: Fraud at an industrial scale [video]
From cheap commute dream to Ticketgate as comments erupt over socialism, privatisation and memes
TLDR: Germany’s budget transit pass was compromised by forged tickets and direct-debit scams, costing hundreds of millions and forcing taxpayer bailouts. The comments erupted into a socialism-vs-privatisation slugfest, peppered with Marx# jokes and a moderator’s warning, as readers argued for tighter regulation and real centralization.
Germany’s low-cost national pass, the Deutschlandticket, was supposed to make commuting easy. Instead, a hacker-conference talk says it turned into fraud at scale: fake tickets printed by a shady site using a stolen signing key, plus mass abuse of SEPA direct debit (that’s the euro area’s bank transfer system) with stolen IBANs (bank numbers), then flipped on Telegram. Tickets were often issued before payments cleared, and many systems couldn’t even revoke them—cue hundreds of millions in losses covered by taxpayers. The HN crowd? Instant drama. One camp argues the real villain is privatisation and weak oversight; another throws spicy “socialism” bait, prompting jokes like Marx# (M#) for “socialist software.” A worried voice wonders if the thread is astroturfed (fake grassroots), and the moderator dang drops a stern “Eschew flamebait” to cool the room. Beneath the memes, the strongest take is simple: when you rush a national ticket across a patchwork of local companies, you need tight rules and central checks or scammers will feast. The community wants delayed ticket issuance until payments clear, real centralization, and someone—anyone—to finally take responsibility. Meanwhile, the comments delivered the popcorn and the punchlines
Key Points
- •Rapid, decentralized rollout of the Deutschlandticket left security and governance gaps, leading to large financial losses.
- •A fraudulent site (d-ticket.su) issued fake Deutschlandtickets using a compromised private signing key linked to Vetter GmbH.
- •The origin of the key compromise remains unclear, and responsible parties were reportedly uncooperative during investigation.
- •SEPA Direct Debit was exploited with invalid or stolen IBANs to mass-purchase tickets, which were resold via Telegram.
- •Many providers issued tickets before payment settlement and lacked revocation mechanisms, enabling large-scale abuse; the talk proposes mitigations.