Member-only story
The QR code scams
I’ve mentioned a few times on here how I love that fact that QR codes are essentially open-source. They don’t call back to some main database to pull the results, as all of the data is literally in the QR code itself. It’s a fantastic way to share simple bits of data, like links to a menu at a restaurant.
However, I’ve noticed a new trick that some websites are doing, and I fell prey to one myself. I needed to generate a few QR codes for an event, so I found a free QR code generator and created them. It required me to sign up for a free account, which seemed like a fair trade-off to me.
I didn’t look closely enough
The problem was that the QR code didn’t point directly to the links that I gave it; they used their own URL shortener for the links (and I didn’t pay close enough attention to notice). That’s not necessarily problematic, but it turns out they were only “free” for two weeks. After that, they were going to disable the shortener behind the codes, rendering them useless.
We had already shared the QR codes with folks and couldn’t redo them at that point, so we needed to pay the annual fee to keep them live. The whole idea of QR codes is to avoid nonsense like this, and I wasn’t careful with how I built them.
