IN China, getting a ticket home for the Lunar New Year can feel a bit like winning the lottery. First, there’s the competition for plane, train and other passenger seats for almost 3 billion voyages. Then there’s the quiz to prove you’re not a robot.

    Beijing hairstylist Yang Mingyue learned how high the odds were in November when she stayed up past midnight to buy train tickets online as soon as they became available. After finding the best fares for the 20-hour trip home to Heilongjiang Province, Yang hit a snag: Cryptic questions she had to answer correctly before her booking would be accepted.

    The puzzles are part of new cyber-security measures designed to thwart scalpers from snapping up seats to resell at inflated prices. But in attempting to block scammers, the perplexing process is catching innocent web users such as Yang.

    “Those questions were so ridiculously difficult, and even when I managed to get them right after a few tries, the seats I wanted were no longer available,” the 21-year-old said. “It’s too late now. Even standing tickets on the dates I wanted are all sold out, economy class air tickets, too. Business class is too expensive.”

    While officially starting the weekend of Feb. 6 this year, the Spring Festival rush for travel bookings for the 40-day travel period commencing Jan. 24 began when tickets went on sale in late November.

    More than 2.9 billion passenger trips, including 332 million on the country’s rail networks, are expected by China’s Ministry of Transportation to be made over the New Year period. The average traveler will cover 410 km, the ministry predicted.

    That magnitude of travel, which represents for many Chinese the only trip home in a year, makes Spring Festival an especially lucrative season for scalpers. In the first two weeks of online fare sales, railway police detained 85 ticket re-sellers and confiscated more than 6,000 legitimate and 12,000 fake train tickets in a nationwide campaign, Xinhua said Dec. 11.

    To beat the cheaters, rules were introduced in 2009 requiring ticket-buyers to identify the passengers for whom bookings were being made. After sales went online via China’s official train ticket booking site, 12306.cn, tech-savvy scalpers developed computer programs to buy up masses of tickets. That prompted the introduction of increasingly stringent security measures, culminating in the questions added to the site in late 2015.

    (SD-Agencies)