MSE News: Got a London Oyster card you don't use? Get your share of Ј124m back

A question about : MSE News: Got a London Oyster card you don't use? Get your share of Ј124m back

Oyster card customers can reclaim both their pay-as-you-go balance and their deposit from Transport for London...

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Got a London Oyster card you don't use? Get your share of Ј124m back

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Best answers:

• Personally, I wish they would merge it with Wave and Pay.
  I would use it with Auto-TopUp disabled, so any theft is limited.
• You should probably clarify that 034 numbers are geographical numbers and are therefore included in the free landline minutes most people have from their landline or mobile.
• My card corrupted and I lost Ј20. The people at Oyster could not have cared less. They had absolutely no intention of refunding me, however much I complained. They kept telling me it was my fault for using up the money. Which, as I had only loaded it the day before, was a bit rich. They are con artists and they will do everything they can to avoid giving you your money. They'll call you a liar, they'll call you deluded, they'll call you stupid. They will take your card from you and give you no receipt or paperwork or proof it ever existed. The man at the counter just threw it in the bin and shrugged his shoulders. I have never been so royally conned as I was by TfL when my card went wrong. Please don't tell people that getting a refund from them will be an easy process. It won't.
• Shouldn't be long before the underground accepts payment by contactless card as the buses already do meaning many occasional users won't need to bother at all with Oyster.
• I also share the view that TfL makes it extremely difficult and close to impossible to get a refund on your old oyster cards.
  My experience was:
  1) I approached the member of staff in the ticket hall but he told me that he is not ticket sales trained so cannot help me to get my deposit back.
  2) I returned in the evening and a staff in the ticket office told me simply to call the number at the back of the card or to go to Kings Cross or Liverpool Street as they can process refunds there.
  3) I tried a different station and the lady in the ticket office explained that I can only get a refund if I bring my passport/driving licence and a copy of my tenancy agreement. I explained that I do not have a tenancy agreement and the advice was to call oyster helpline again.
  4) I called the helpline and after a lot of voice recognition problems I got to talk to the gentleman who said that the easiest and quickest way to get my deposit back is to go back to the station.
  5) I gave up for some time but then had another oyster to give back as my sister left it with me. So again, I was asked if it was registered to which I replied I did not know and the staff made me feel like I was a fraudster or a pick pocket trying to steal a 5 pound deposit. In the end I was told that I could not get back the deposit but I can get back whatever has been left on pay as you go but the refund can only be processed to the debit card that had been used to top up.
  I think the staff in general do not want/like to deal with oyster refunds and not because they are unhelpful or want to improve TfL's cash flow but because they have an easy option of saying - go to a ticket machine if you want to top up or call oyster helpline for anything else.
  Believe me if it was so easy and straightforward to get money back from TfL we would not need to discuss this problem here as everyone would simply return the oyster to the ticket office and get their money.
  If you need to find an open ticket office, bring some supporting documents, remember passwords, have the same debit/credit card you used to top up then it is just structurally customer unfriendly.
• Another issue: Martin's blog says that refunds are made by the original payment method. I paid my deposit with a credit card that no longer exists: I suspect that many people are in this position.
• It used to be the case that if you had filled up the Oyster from multiple methods, ie cash + card(s) that it couldn't be refunded in a station but only at the main centre. Not clear whether this is still the case but they only refer to one payment method.
  Ultimately the problems is that the value is carried on the card rather than centrally, which is why they need it to be returned.
• Hi Voyager2002, we've now added the following info into the news story to answer your question.
  The initial method used to pay for the card will be the same method used to refund both the credit and deposit. If the payment method you originally used was a debit or credit card that's since expired, you can ask for the refund to be transferred to a nominated bank account or to receive it via cheque. If you haven't registered your card, you'll need to show some form of ID in order to get the refund. You can't get a refund on behalf of someone else.
• Be aware that some special edition oyster cards can be sold on eBay, so check this out before sending it back for a refund.
  I have a London 2012 one, which is worth Ј10-15. I'm hanging onto it because I do go to London once or twice a year.
• I warned literally years ago under an MSE alter-ego that TFL/Capita were sitting on tens of millions - and that was just an educated guess.
  Basically what we have here is an illegal slush fund. It is money that is supposed to be held in trust for customers but has been reattributed for use by crooks who are very reluctant to give it back. You have to fill in forms and get everything spot on to get at your own money. Never mind the word "crooks" for that's old hat, but notice that word reattributed. I borrowed it from somewhere else. It is actually a crooked misnomer in itself. A closer word would be redistributed (as in redistributed wealth).
  Google reattribution alongside the words "with profits" to find out where and why, and then if you are old enough to know who Norwich Union, Commercial Union and AXA Equity and Life were, then check your pockets carefully. It basically means sequestered or nicked. And what does that mean?
  Well if you have lived as long as me you might realise that time and money are very much the same thing like Einstein's mass and energy.
  If you keep other people's money long enough it basically loses its monetary worth to them, but whomever holds it gets all the benefit in the meantime.
  If you work for one of these organisations and believe in the culture that sequesters the wealth of the common man whom you euphemistically might call your customers, then you should be ashamed. You won't be of course, because the rotten culture is ingrained unto the grave.
• I live outside London and ended up with 4-5 oyster cards kicking about my house, each with god-knows-how-much credit on them.
  So last time I went down to London, I took them all with me, along with my driving license & disabled railcard & waited in the TFL queue at euston.
  The lady gave me a form to fill in & sign, and I walked away with one oyster card (now activated for the 30% off-peak disabled discount) and Ј27-odd credit on it. Took about 10 mins.
  Well worth doing if you're in a similar situation.
• On returning from holiday, we'd forgotten to bring our oyster cards with us but I was able to quickly and easily buy 4 more cards for the family from a machine at the Piccadilly line station at Heathrow so we all got home via tube and bus for quite a lot less than if we'd bought paper zone tickets or a travelcard (or a minicab!).
  I'm going to simply claim a refund on all 4 tomorrow. No registration or form was necessary to buy, so it strikes me as odd that I can't just swipe the same credit card, touch each oyster to confirm and then drop it into a slot on a similar machine to get the refund. Why the additional bureacracy?
• I use my Oyster for pay as you go only. Excluding periodic travel passes, is there any point in keeping my Oyster if I can now get the same TFL pay as you go deal by using my contactless debit card?