A teenager has been arrested for allegedly issuing fake parking tickets near the beach in Santa Cruz, the Santa Cruz Police Department said.
Damian Vela, a 19-year-old Watsonville resident, was arrested around 4 p.m. last Thursday when police say he admitted to the crime but denied receiving any payments.
Don't use your phone's camera app to open QR codes. If you are going to open them, you should use your Anti-virus app's QR scanner, or a dedicated QR/barcode code reader app. There's no reason for any restaurant menu, bus schedule, or other QR code to take you to any link-shortener intermediary site like https://t.co/xxxx or https://bit.ly/yyyy before redirecting you to (for example) the restaurant's menu.
Any miscreant with a computer and a printer can create and print malicious QR codes to take you to wherever they wish.
Just becuase there is a URL printed along side the QR code doesn't mean that 1) that's what the QR code contains, nor 2) that its the actual website of the business. Its true that many businesses register domains defensively, and blackhole them so that they can't be used for phishing, malvertizing, or by competitors/detractors, so unless you're sure of a business' website, your best bet is to locate the correct URL via search engine.
Towards the end of 2021, a local restaurant printed QR codes for their online menus, or rather QR codes to a link-shortener for their online menus. After scanning the QR code with my AV and finding it to a link-shortener, I informed the manager that (because I had checked myself before blocking the tracking) their own website provided all of the customer demographic information as that link-shortener's product, and that the URL to his menu would fit easily within a QR code, so he was simply wasting money. A couple of months and several visits later, they reprinted the QR codes as links to their menu page on their own website.
Reminds me of the story that happened back in the '60s when banks started issuing micr encoded deposit slips. A guy got them in the mail, went to his bank, and slipped them into the supply at the customer tables. A week later he closed out his account. When the bank figured out what happened, they tried to get the money back, but he hadn't broken any law.
'Attempted fraud'.
ReplyDeleteAnd he was not even in elected office. Yet.
Don't use your phone's camera app to open QR codes. If you are going to open them, you should use your Anti-virus app's QR scanner, or a dedicated QR/barcode code reader app. There's no reason for any restaurant menu, bus schedule, or other QR code to take you to any link-shortener intermediary site like https://t.co/xxxx or https://bit.ly/yyyy before redirecting you to (for example) the restaurant's menu.
ReplyDeleteAny miscreant with a computer and a printer can create and print malicious QR codes to take you to wherever they wish.
Just becuase there is a URL printed along side the QR code doesn't mean that 1) that's what the QR code contains, nor 2) that its the actual website of the business. Its true that many businesses register domains defensively, and blackhole them so that they can't be used for phishing, malvertizing, or by competitors/detractors, so unless you're sure of a business' website, your best bet is to locate the correct URL via search engine.
Towards the end of 2021, a local restaurant printed QR codes for their online menus, or rather QR codes to a link-shortener for their online menus. After scanning the QR code with my AV and finding it to a link-shortener, I informed the manager that (because I had checked myself before blocking the tracking) their own website provided all of the customer demographic information as that link-shortener's product, and that the URL to his menu would fit easily within a QR code, so he was simply wasting money. A couple of months and several visits later, they reprinted the QR codes as links to their menu page on their own website.
Reminds me of the story that happened back in the '60s when banks started issuing micr encoded deposit slips. A guy got them in the mail, went to his bank, and slipped them into the supply at the customer tables. A week later he closed out his account. When the bank figured out what happened, they tried to get the money back, but he hadn't broken any law.
ReplyDelete