Phishing schemes already litter the internet, and now they’re coming for our parking meters, too. San Antonio police were first to warn locals about the scam, which targets people trying to pay for their parking ticket via QR code. Authorities say people have started plastering their own QR codes onto the machines, which direct people to scammy pay-portals when scanned.
The police department noted in a separate tweet that anyone who suffered a credit card breach after making a parking meter payment—and suspects they might have fallen prey to one of these scams—to file a police report and notify their bank “immediately.”
It’s a pretty clever (albeit pretty scummy) way to skim a few bucks off car owners, and it turns out San Antonio isn’t the only city being hit here. After San Antonio issued its warning in late December, Austin and Houston began inspecting their own meters. Sure enough, a local Fox News affiliate in the Austin area reported last week that similar fake codes were plastered onto 29 of its parking meters. A local Houston news network then reported that it caught five parking meters with the same fraudulent codes.
The Houston report claims that car-owners who scanned the seemingly innocuous QR codes would be taken to a now-defunct site, “passportlab.xyz,” that would direct people to log into a “Quick Pay Parking” system. After that payment goes through, the bad actor running the site could supposedly make…
