News and notes from around the interweb:
- Airport train services hit by £100k cable theft (HT: Enilria)
Trains to Manchester Airport have been affected by the theft of more than £100,000 of power cable from a railway line.
The signalling cables were stolen from the railway line between Preston and Bolton over Christmas.
All lines between these stations will be closed “for most of the day” while repair work is carried out, a Network Rail spokesperson said.
- Organized crime is draining gift cards
Card draining is when criminals remove gift cards from a store display, open them in a separate location, and either record the card numbers and PINs or replace them with a new barcode. The crooks then repair the packaging, return to a store and place the cards back on a rack. When a customer unwittingly selects and loads money onto a tampered card, the criminal is able to access the card online and steal the balance.
…In card draining, the runners assist with removing, tampering and restocking of gift cards, according to court documents and investigators.
A single runner driving from store to store can swipe or return thousands of tampered cards to racks in a short time. “What they do is they just fly into the city and they get a rental car and they just hit every big-box location that they can find along a corridor off an interstate,” said Parks.
- The temporary lifting of the cap on Chase Aeroplan cardmembers redeeming points through ‘Pay Yourself Back’ has ended. There’s now a limit of up to 200,000 points per year redeemed for travel at 1.25 cents apiece.
The limit doesn’t apply to annual fee redemptions or low-value (0.8 cents per point) dining and grocery redemptions. But no more uncapped transfers of points from Capital One and Amex to Aeroplan to spend at 1.25 cents on flights, hotels, car rentals, etc.
- American Airlines flies the most seats. They’re basically flat year-over-year. Delta and United are growing, while Southwest is under pressure to shrink.
- Shouldn’t the separate cleaning fee mean they at least clean well?
AirBNB Charges a $200 Cleaning Fee but Kids’ Sock Look Like This When We Leave
byu/ThaShitPostAccount inmildlyinfuriating - Oh, Brady.
@AmericanAir fed us the most repugnant "food" imaginable. An 8 hour flight & THIS is what we get? The lettuce felt 3 weeks old. That is how the chicken came- I did not move it. Fly Delta. pic.twitter.com/plBHPrOqeu
— Ginger Weiland (@GingerWeiland) December 31, 2024
- United is just trying to match the quality of Asian carriers who keep their cabins too warm.
@united seat 15E on flight 1076 now, DEN-CLE, missing the air vent. I'm sweating….and bad enough being in the middle seat. pic.twitter.com/XDdn9w8fdq
— Jeff Pugel (@jeffpugel) December 31, 2024
On the rail issue in the UK: Didn’t a similar ‘sabotage’ of the train lines occur in France at the start of the 2024 Olympics? Sure, it could be locals; however, with the recent Russian/Chinese ghost fleet tampering with undersea telecommunications cables in the Baltic, we should not be surprised by hybrid warfare by our foreign adversaries. They already weaponized social media against us.
The train cable is simple copper theft. Copper is at record high prices, and this is most likely the motive behind this. Thieves are stealing copper from EV charges, stop lights, and all sorts of places.
I rarely use gift cards but crooks draining them is a bit like airlines devaluing earned mileage or points by requiring a lot more for typical flights.
Cable theft for scrap metal value is unfortunately nothing new in Europe (or anywhere else for that matter). And when copper prices are high, the crooks are more motivated than ever, as are others to look the other way. It also tends to happen more when the local public is financially worse off than they already usually are. But maybe we can take this as another sign of a Broken Britain broken by right-wing British politics.
Sounds like Russia.
Across the pond like here in the US we think that if we coddle criminals they will stop committing crimes.
Notice the color scheme of the subway cars in the thumb nail photo.
Looks like Southwest come to Manchester!!!
That’s actually a ‘south western railway’ train, which goes nowhere near the affected area in the North – and yes some of their trains are painted very much like Southwest.
On the contrary, Southwest’s livery is newer, it’s Southwest planes that are painted like trains