Be careful when scanning a QR code with your mobile! Hackers can steal your money and information

The FBI warns of a considerable increase in fraudulent QR codes that seek to steal the personal and financial information of victims.

An action as innocent as scanning a QR code from a bus stop, a web page or any street advertisement with our mobile phone, it can be the necessary trigger for you to lose all your banking and personal information.

And it is that the FBI is reporting, via Command, that more and more cybercriminals are dedicating themselves to embedding or modifying QR codes to redirect victims to fraudulent websites to enter their personal information or banking credentials in order to steal all their money.

The FBI has just issued a warning about schemes in which cybercriminals manipulate legitimate QR codes to redirect potential victims to sites phishing. Basically what they do is either replace legitimate codes with malicious ones or modify them to redirect to fraudulent websites.

In other cases, the QR code may also contain malware, which will allow the cybercriminal to gain access to the victim’s terminal, not only to access its location, but also to keep all its information.

However, recently we saw that cybercriminals were placing fraudulent QR codes on parking meters in certain cities in the United States, and now they want to go much further by manipulating existing QR codes or inserting these codes in all kinds of places to make it tickle. victim.

Some of the advice that the FBI has given so that we avoid falling into this type of fraudulent QR code scams are the following:

• Once you scan a QR code, you should check the URL in the address bar to see if it actually points to the desired site, confirming that it is the official web address.
• You should think twice about entering login, personal, or financial information from a site you’ve reached via a QR code. It is better to access the website directly by typing it manually in the address bar.
• If you scan a QR code that you find stuck in a store or anywhere on street furniture, you must be sure that it has not been previously modified.
• Never download applications from a QR code, search for the application directly in your official application store.
• Never complete payments through a QR code, make payments through your official payment platform.
• Use your mobile camera to scan the QR codes and never use QR code reader apps, they are not necessary and are less secure.
• If you receive a QR code from a known contact, verify with this contact that they have really sent you this QR code, on many occasions cybercriminals steal the accounts of known contacts to deceive us.

Obviously you should use common sense before entering sensitive information on the Internet, and perhaps that is more important than any other advice.