When Les Howard could not find change for parking during a trip to the coast, a quick response (QR) code on the meter seemed to be the answer. But the next day, the 61-year-old realised he had become the 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 gone up by 700% in the past four years, figures by Report Fraud have revealed.
Experts say criminals are finding different ways to exploit the codes as they become a common part of everyday life. This could be disguising suspicious links in emails, gaining access to victims' messaging apps or convincing people who are out and about to download fraudulent apps to steal their money and data. That 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 doing the same thing but Howard recalled how he became 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'." So he stopped, deleted the app from his phone and parked somewhere else. But by then he said he received a notification on his phone that £1 had been taken from his account. The next day, another notification came through, but 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, said it did not use QR codes for parking payments, and had removed two fake QR code stickers from its car parks in the past year. Criminals have used similar tactics in car parks and railway stations across the country.
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 growing. Report Fraud, which covers England, Wales and Northern Ireland, told the BBC it received 2,743 reports mentioning QR codes in the past 12 months - in the year ending in August 2022 it was just 341. This is likely to be an underestimate with many victims not choosing to report.
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