Criminals in New York City used to routinely steal subway tokens by jamming the turnstile slots with paper and then physically sucking the trapped token out with their mouths.

How a jammed turnstile became a fare-theft trick

Before electronic fare cards, New York City subway riders paid with metal tokens. A turnstile’s slot fed each token into a mechanism that registered the fare and unlocked the barrier. Blocking that path with paper could keep a token from moving through normally—and create an opportunity to retrieve it instead of paying again.

The method depended on a small vulnerability in a system built for a simple exchange: insert a token, pass through. A jam could disrupt that exchange while leaving the token physically reachable. The reported practice of sucking it out turned the obstruction into a crude way to reclaim the fare.

The countermeasure targeted the point of contact

Transit workers’ response was direct: put chili powder and mace in the slots. Both are irritants, so reaching into or putting one’s mouth against an affected opening could become unpleasant. Rather than redesigning every turnstile, the deterrent made the act of retrieving a trapped token carry an immediate cost.

That response also shows the tradeoff in an improvised fix: anything placed in a public fare slot could affect an ordinary rider as well as someone trying to steal. The vulnerability was not just that a token could be trapped; it was that the same opening served everyone. A fare system’s smallest moving parts could become the focus of both a petty theft and a rough-and-ready defense against it.