I was going to post this in !britishcolumbia@lemmy.ca, but this is likely a national / international problem.
City officials say the QR codes were not authorized by either the municipality or its mobile payment provider, PayByPhone. While the stickers appeared to advertise a convenient way to pay for parking, they actually redirected drivers to a fraudulent site.
I guess it’s best to either use the machine (while jiggling the card reader), or you keep the official app pre-installed on your device
How long til we’re back to physical machines with card slots again? I guess they’ll have to add some sort of tapping feature for everyone carrying phones and watches for their wallets now. But QR codes have always been the stupidest way to try and set these up, but it’s also the cheapest so no wonder that’s what they went with.
In Vancouver, I almost always see both a physical machine and the app/website options.
It might even be helpful to do away with QR codes altogether and slowly teach people to not scan random QR codes when paying.
A sign saying “Watch out for scams, do not scan any QR codes” + a visual 🚫 symbol would make it a lot harder for these scams to work