Les Used a QR Code to Download an App – But It Was a Scam
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Les used a QR code to download an app – but it was a scam
Image source:
Les Howard
Image caption:
Les Howard said he became suspicious and tried to delete the scam app
By Tom Moseley
Producer, Scam Secrets
Published 3 hours ago
When Les Howard couldn’t find change for parking during a trip to the coast, a quick response (QR) code on the meter seemed like an easy solution. However, the next day, he realized he had become a victim of an increasingly common scam as criminals started taking money from his bank account in £60 chunks.
Reports of QR code-related scams have surged by 700% in the past four years, according to figures from Report Fraud. Experts attribute this rise to criminals exploiting QR codes as they become more integrated into daily life, disguising suspicious links in emails, gaining access to victims’ messaging apps, or convincing people to download fraudulent apps and steal their money and data.
This is what happened to Howard, from Widnes, who was visiting Caernarfon in North Wales with his wife.
"We went to the car park where we normally go," Howard told the BBC Scam Secrets podcast.
"I normally have change in the car to pay for the parking, but this time I didn’t. So there was a QR code to download and get an app and pay via an app."
Other people in the car park were also downloading the app, but Howard remembered feeling suspicious:
"I thought ‘I don’t like the idea of this because I’m going to have to put my card details into an app that I’ve only just downloaded, which wasn’t of my choosing’."
He decided to stop and delete the app from his phone, opting instead to park somewhere else. But by then, he had already received a notification on his phone that £1 had been taken from his account. The next day, another notification appeared, this time for £60, to the same recipient – so he called his bank.
"I told them I’d downloaded it, I tried to stop, but I’d obviously gone too far," he said.
"She said ‘it’s a good job you rang up, because they’ve set up a monthly £60 subscription’."
The council responsible for car parks in the area, Cyngor Gwynedd, stated that it does not use QR codes for parking payments and had removed two fake QR code stickers from its car parks in the past year.
Similar tactics have been used by criminals in car parks and railway stations across the UK. Data from City of London Police released under the Freedom of Information Act suggests the problem of QR code-related scams – known as "quishing" – is on the rise.
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[Figure caption: Data from City of London Police]
Report Fraud, which covers England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, received 2,743 reports mentioning QR codes in the past 12 months (ending August 2022) – a stark rise from just 341 reports the previous year. This figure is likely an underestimate, as many victims choose not to report.
"We’re definitely seeing a rise in the use of QR codes to conduct a range of criminal activity," said Ollie Whitehouse, chief technology officer for the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). "I think as they become more commonplace, naturally criminals will jump on to the back of that."
