The Art of the Swipe

By Hector Felix

The Bronx Journal Staff Writer

Ever wonder what those guys standing by the subway turnstiles are doing, muttering “swipe” as you walk by? Are they good Samaritans offering you a free ride? Not exactly. They are subway scalpers and they usually sell a swipe using either a 30-day unlimited pass, or a doctored card.

Swiping goes on every day at the Fordham Road D train station in the Bronx. Many people have to take the train at the corner of Fordham Road and the Grand Concourse to travel to their jobs in Manhattan and the other boroughs. Fordham Metrocard “swipers” stand outside the train turnstiles and nonchalantly charge people to get onto the train platform.

The Metropolitan Transit Authority considers this “selling of unauthorized MTA services” and it carries a penalty of up to three months in jail. Charging a stranger money to enter the subway using your 30-day unlimited Metrocard is against the law, as is doing so for a friend or family member. It is also illegal to doctor the cards, as some clever swipers do.

John*, 56, an African American man who was lingering near the turnstile at the D train stop on Fordham Road has seen swipers get caught. “The police come down here, push you against the wall. You swiped people through. They could lock you up. It’s called a sale,” he said.

Swipers can make money in several different ways. They can buy a weekly or monthly Metrocard and sell a swipe for a discounted price of $1-$2. They can also manipulate a card, usually by bending or twisting it, in a way that tricks the turnstile into thinking it is valid. Each Metrocard has its own assigned number and is magnetically stored with value. John said he has certainly seen others doing it. “Some guys take the cards on the ground, discarded cards, and it says zero balance. They just bend them a little bit… They know how to do it a certain way,” he said.

The more industrious gum up or stuff used cards into the credit card slot of the Metrocard vending machine. Frustrated customers, unable to buy a card, have to exit the station and walk to another entrance, or buy a ride from a helpful swipe artist. This can be tempting when there is a very long line.

“You see sometimes it be backed-up like this,” said John. “The machine is not broken right now, you see customers … they don’t want to wait. You give me $2, I’ll put you right through,” he said, after requesting $2 to explain his swiping system.

A booth worker at the Kingsbridge Station said that the MTA sometimes sees 300 swipes on a single Metrocard in one day. “At $2.25 per ride, 300 swipes can make one of these scalpers $675 a day,” she said. The MTA especially does not like when swipers bend empty Metrocards, with no value.

In addition to the loss of revenue, some Fordham commuters say they feel uncomfortable when approached about a swipe. “It’s annoying as hell seeing these people swipe for money,” Mark1447 posted on the NYC Transit Forums website. “Same goes for all the stations out there with these bums. I’m waiting for the day the cops grab them swipers at Fordham on the IND and jail them. Every time I go there, there’s a swiper and (more than one) and the Metrocard vending machine is broken. I did once see a cop there, taking them out, but they still came back.”

One explanation for the increase in swipe activity is that the MTA has had to close or reduce staff in some Bronx station booths. At the Kingsbridge Road Station, for example, on the south side, there is no attendant. Where once you could see an MTA worker in uniform every day, now there is just the bleak black plastic, obscuring the inside of the booth.

Criminal activity in these stations goes up as they go unattended. Subway criminal activity was up 17 percent up in 2011 over 2010, according to the NYPD.

“At any rate, it at least doesn’t appear that the MTA is all that concerned with fare evasion as a whole since there are many unstaffed entrances in the system with low turnstiles,” said BroadwayBuffer, another member of the forum. “Without a cop present it pretty much makes it an honor system.”

There’s no dishonor in swipers trying to survive, said John. They are not robbing people or selling drugs, he said. Right now, John is unemployed. “I have an unlimited card. I just put the people in the train to make me a couple of dollars, so I could get me some pizza. Sometimes I make enough to get me some Skittles, Snickers,” he said.

Initially, the MTA wanted to charge swipers with petit larceny. However, in December 2011, the Court of Appeals overturned the charges of petit larceny against Joseph Hightower, 28, who had sold a ride to someone in Midtown, Manhattan, for less than the $2.25 fare. The court decided that Hightower, from New Jersey, wasn’t stealing from the MTA, but rather he was just selling the MTA service without authorization. This carries a sentence of up to 90 days in jail, instead of the whole year.

Swiper John says that if there were more opportunities and jobs in the Bronx, he would definitely stop “swiping.” He is always looking for ways to step up his game though, even going as far as learning some Spanish. “I say ‘Dos pesos, pasa. No sirve, the machine is broken. No sirve, dos pesos pasa.'”

*John is not his real name.