~$ train ticket shenanigans: the 83rd kontiki conference

Posted on Mar. 20th, 2026. | Est. reading time: 3 minutes

Tags: ConferenceTrain Ticket Shenanigans

as the astute reader will have noticed from this being the second post in the newly minted train ticket shenanigans category of posts, i’ve ended up a member of a small conspiracy that is very very intent on staring at train tickets and what they look like.

this iteration of the train ticket shenanigans once more involved co-conspirator and mostly ringleader Q, with the both of us travelling to Berlin to attend and present at the 83rd Kontiki Conference, which is a quarterly meeting of members of the Verband Deutscher Verkehrsunternehmen (Association of German Transport Companies) at which presentations occur which delve on new projects and strategies used by regional traffic operators.

our talk followed very closely in the footsteps of the congress talk, but spent more time on the various avenues of fraud that we’d detected, and - given the theme of the conference touched on AI - how a lot of the attackers were using AI tooling in order to commit fraud, and which platforms we had found that enabled this fraud.

this was all quite interesting and enriching in terms of figuring out current trends in the industry, as well as meeting with some of the people that we’d been working with in the context of the UIC’s FCG UG (Internation Union of Railway Undertakings - Union Internationale des Chemins de Fer | Flexible Content Barcode | User Group).