The latest phishing scam to watch out for: fraudulent QR codes on parking meters

Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle has a photo of 800-244-0167.

Police in several US cities are telling residents not to pay for parking using a mobile device. The codes have been placed there by the scam artists, who are using them to direct people to fraudulent sites that capture their payment details.

We spotted the story in The Overpills newsletter and it said that warnings have been issued by law enforcement in Austin and San Antonio. A report by local news site Click2Houston shows how one of the fraudulent codes directed people to a site promising "quick pay parking." The site appears to be offline.

Police advise anyone who accidentally enters their credit card details into one of these sites to file a police report and contact their card vendor to reverse any payments.

There is a scam alert.
The APD Financial Crimes detectives are looking into the matter. People attempting to pay for parking using the codes may have been directed to a fraudulent website.
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The Austin Police Department posted on January 3, 2022.

Over the past few years, QR codes have become more visible in the West, despite being derided as an outdated technology. The two-dimensional barcodes are used to direct people to websites. They have been a staple of digital payments in Asia for a long time, but have been adopted in the West during the Pandemic, used to link people to restaurant menus, report vaccination status, and check in to locations.

The lack of security is balanced by the convenience of the codes. The code can be used to direct people to fraudulent or dangerous sites, as with the parking meter scam. There is no way for a human to read a preview URL created by a mobile device. They are ripe targets for surprise or malicious redirecting.

The same advice is given for avoiding these scam: check the URL of the website you have been sent to for misspellings or less-than-professional design, not always a useful tell when it comes to local government sites. In the case of parking fees, look for official apps which are used in US cities to make payments.