By David Dyck

Two Chinese identity thieves had stolen over 100 U-Passes

A Chinese couple who are convicted of U-Pass fraud were deported late last year. The duo had stolen information from over 150 Simon Fraser University students, the CBC reported. The guilty couple, Siyuan Gu and Jing Wang, pleaded guilty to the charges, and were deported on December 27.

Between September and the couple’s arrest in November 2011, they had obtained 128 U-Passes.

According to court documents, the couple’s apartment was raided by police, where they found “some retail PIN card terminals, a pinhole camera, wireless remote transmitter and receiver, a magnetic card reader, lock picks, and locksmith tools.”

During the raid, police also found information on students from computers on SFU campuses, which the thieves obtained using devices that tracked users’ keystrokes. They were also connected to theft of purses and wallets in the Burnaby area.

U-Pass fraud has been an ongoing problem for TransLink, as many students had been offering them for sale on Craigslist, the online classifieds website. Early last year, Translink considered ending the U-Pass program on the grounds that they were losing too much money — as much as $15 million per year — to this type of fraud.

Since then, with the extension of the program to every post-secondary institution in the lower mainland, the U-Pass system has been updated. Instead of issuing a U-Pass to every student, machines have been put in place to dispense transit passes on a monthly basis.

There is no information yet as to whether or not the new measures have been effective in preventing U-Pass fraud.

According to the SFU website, “if you are caught using another student’s U-Pass B.C. or using a U-Pass B.C. forgery your U-Pass will be seized and you may be fined $173 or charged with fraud and arrested.”