Brussels Transit Authority Responds to Fare Evasion Alert with Multilingual Humor

"Drare ajd contrôle de STIB à gdm. Faites Belek à vous", which means in correct French: "Brothers, STIB check today at Gare du Midi. Be careful." This is the message posted on Twitter by a netizen. "Ok! Choukran bezef frerot!", translated from Arabic to French: "Thank you very much brother!" This is the humorous response from the STIB CM.

The fraud recorded on the network is immeasurable. Last November, the STIB had recalled during the launch of a campaign aimed at encouraging network users to pay for their journey that fraud on its network costs it around 11 million euros per year. In addition, the 2018 network checks showed that out of more than 1.2 million users checked, more than 5% of them were fraudsters.

To solve the problem to some extent, the STIB has decided to make the entire network free for under 25s and over 65s. This is a measure included in the Brussels government agreement that will cost the public company nearly 12 million.