Tickets for 600, resale for 1800: a scheme that has been going on for the third month

Since the beginning of summer, passengers have again been actively complaining that tickets for Ukrzaliznytsia trains are sold out within minutes of the opening of sales. It is becoming increasingly difficult to buy them officially, while the same tickets appear on social networks and Telegram channels, but at much higher prices.

Despite the promises and measures taken by Ukrzaliznytsia, the problem with resellers is only getting worse, as reported by the Ukrainian media.

How it works

Every day at 8:00 the system opens ticket sales. People prepare: they open applications, log in to the site, wait for the purchase “button”. But after a few minutes they find out: there are no free seats, connection error or try later.

This time is enough for automated programs — the so-called bots — to buy up most of the tickets. Within a few hours, the same seats appear in Telegram channels at a price of 1,800 UAH, while the official price is about 600–700 UAH.

Those who were unable to buy a ticket directly are often put under such conditions, because there is no alternative.

Ukrzaliznytsia’s response

The company acknowledges the problem and reports that since the summer of 2025 it has been actively trying to combat resellers. In particular:

they have reduced the ticket sales period from 45 to 20 days;

they have limited the number of tickets per order to four;

for international destinations, mandatory verification via the app or “Diya.Pidpis” has been introduced;

they regularly block accounts with suspicious activity, we are talking about hundreds of blocked profiles;

they have introduced automatic booking by request for some destinations.

But these measures are proving insufficient. Resellers adapt by registering numerous fake accounts, buying tickets in other people’s names, and sometimes even concluding unofficial agreements with conductors.

The biggest problem is observed on international routes, such as Kyiv-Warsaw, Lviv-Przemysl, Chernivtsi-Bucharest. There, tickets are sold out almost instantly.

Users activate screenshots, demonstrating how the Ukrzaliznytsia website freezes or how seats disappear immediately after appearing.

In some cases, it turned out that the carriages remained partially empty, but it was officially impossible to buy tickets for these seats, which raised suspicions of possible fraud and “booking” under the influence of resellers.

In 2024, the police detained groups of resellers who were automatically buying tickets. Criminal cases were opened in these cases for fraud and interference in IT systems. Sometimes the cases indicated possible cooperation with individual employees of Ukrzaliznytsia.

However, these were isolated incidents, and no systemic solutions to the problem have yet been found.