Motics Protects the Deutschland Ticket

Subscription tickets, especially the Deutschland ticket with its offshoots of Job ticket und Semester ticket, account for the largest share of transportation companies’ revenue by far. The fare conditions are as follows:

The Deutschland ticket is non-transferable and is issued as a chip card or a mobile ticket that includes the passenger’s first and last name. A ticket issued as a barcode ticket also includes the passenger’s date of birth.

An analysis of many passenger inspections showed that the same ticket, with the same vendor ID and ticket number, was recorded at stops more than 100 kilometers apart at virtually the same time. So it must have been on different phones.

Checking passenger names and ID cards are rather time-consuming and therefore rarely conducted. Due to frequent abuse of the ticketing system, Motics technology was implemented on a nationwide basis after the e-ticket service (((eTicket Deutschland general meeting in 2025.

This mobile ticketing crypto service connects the existing security systems of (((eTicket Deutschland and a passenger’s smartphone.

Since June 2026, the Regensburg Transport Autority (RVV) has been issuing MENTZ Gullivr app tickets with Motics copy protection.

The copy protection is established using a secure ID, which is issued by the Association of German Transport Companies (VDV) using an additional library (Lib) that has to be integrated into the mobile app. Once the app has been downloaded, the Lib retrieves this secure ID from the VDV when the app is launched for the first time. The app subsequently relays the ID to the MENTZ ticket shop, meaning to the backend. After purchase, the app receives a ticket that contains the secure ID in the ticket’s signed character string, which is called a “static authorization” by the VDV. Before inspection, the app must re-sign the ticket character string along with the time and the secure ID from the VDV lib in the app and present the resulting QR code to an inspection device. The inspection device then compares the time and the two secure IDs and can determine whether there is a copy.

There are a few situations that can complicate the process, but the switch to Motics can be made during normal operations.

• In many cases, customers have subscriptions for Deutschland tickets. If they install the Motics app for the first time, they will initially keep their purchased Deutschland ticket, which is not protected by Motics. The existing tickets on their phone to be protected by Motics must be canceled immediately and replaced with new protected ones.
• If a customer had the Motics app, but buys a new cell phone and downloads the app, must replace all currently valid tickets, as well as any existing tickets that have future validity, with new tickets the first time they login or load their tickets.

MENTZ made the entire process as transparent as possible for customers and customer support. All actions are displayed in the ticket shop’s service portal.

The following images show the same ticket, which is re-signed every 15 seconds. Notice that the barcodes are different because the signature has changed. The inspection device recognizes the time down to the second that the ticket was generated and can thus assertain that it is not a copy.