For a year municipal authorities in San Francisco have warned about scammers putting phony, but legitimate appearing parking tickets on the cars of people. The phony parking tickets contain a QR code that takes you to a bogus, but legitimate appearing website where you are prompted to pay the ticket. Making things worse,if you fall for this scam, you are likely to lose more money than the amount of the phony parking fine because you have turned over your credit or debit card number to the scammers to use as they see fit. While this scam seems to have originated in California, it is spreading throughout the country.
Quick Response codes or QR codes have been around since 1994, but they have become much more popular in recent years and can be commonly found on parking meters, in restaurants and in advertising. When you scan a QR code with your phone, it will take you to a website. Unfortunately as the popularity of QR codes has increased with the public, its popularity has also increased with scammers who are setting up phony QR codes to lure you to their bogus website where they solicit personal information used for identity theft or persuade you to make a payment with a credit card or even in some instances, merely by scanning the phony QR code, you will download harmful malware such as ransomware or even malware that will enable the scammer to take over your email account. I have written about QR code scams called “quishing” since 2021.
TIPS
As I often say, “trust me, you can’t trust anyone.” If you receive such a parking ticket you may wish to confirm with your local parking authority whether it is legitimate or not before paying it.
Finally, there are companies that have free QR code scanner apps that will not only scan the QR code, but also let you know if it is legitimate and prevent the downloading of malware from bogus QR codes.
If you are not a subscriber to Scamicide.com and would like to receive free daily emails with the Scam of the day, all you need to do is to go to the bottom of the initial page of http://www.scamicide.com and type in your email address where it indicates “Sign up for this blog.”