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
Wow, someone should tell the City of Edmonton about this. Last year they eliminated physical parking machines in the city, and there is a QR code on basically every parking sign now. I wonder if anyone considered how vulnerable QR codes are to these imitation scams.
I assume they already have active countermeasures in place, but then again, online-only street parking seems rather ill-conceived to begin with.
That sounds rough for people who don’t have a smartphone, if you forget it somewhere, if it’s out of power, etc
It’s also a pain in the ass for travellers to need yet another bloody app each time they visit a new city.