Odd Scam: Watch Out Using Parking Meters Montana

This Often-Seen Graphic Is Getting More Attention, even in Montana

You've seen the black and white graphic on your television, the supermarket, restaurants, the mall and probably even at your gas station.  It is even used by most companies for an instruction manual to assemble items.

Developed in 1994 in Japan, the "quick response code" or better known as the "QR Code" is used to label everything and anything.  Even a person's body can sport one of these fancy graphics, as seen recently at the MTV Music Awards:

Odd Scam: Watch Out Using Parking Meters Montana

A new scam involving these codes is just now starting to make the rounds, and it is easy to see how even in Montana you could fall prey to criminals attempting to gain access to your personal information.

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The Better Business Bureau (BBB) in July issued a new warning about QR Codes and parking meters being targeted.  Many new meters feature the ability to use a code via your phone to pay for parking.  Unfortunately, those codes might not be what they seem.

They could be taking you to a malicious website designed to gather your credit card information and lead to fraud and even identity theft.

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The Simple Way to See if That Code is Real or Not

If you have a question on whether or not the code that you are seeing on that meter or payment box is real is quite simple.

Pay directly to the meter or payment box.  Simple, right?

via GIPHY

But, if you insist on using the QR code, there are a few other ways that you can keep yourself safe from being scammed.

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The BBB offers these ideas and tips when encountering these codes in the wild:

• Watch out for short links that may have a malicious website link within it
• Check the website URL.  Many malicious links contain misspelled words or numbers in place of letters
• Install a QR Scanner from a reliable antivirus company

And finally, look and touch it.  Many criminals will place a sticker over the original code that you can see or feel.  If a code appears to have been tampered with, avoiding it is probably for the best.