I’ve always wondered about the possibility of using QR codes for nefarious purposes, since they essentially encode URLs or other information in a format not easily readable by humans. ZDNet reports about some scammers who used QR code generators to steal tens of thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoins.
The scam here is fairly straightforward. When requesting payment in Bitcoin, users often send QR codes to recipients that encode the wallet information that the Bitcoin payment should be sent to. This is because Bitcoin addresses are fairly lengthy.
The scammers set up a Bitcoin generator that would always generate a QR code pointing back to a wallet controlled by the scammers. Since QR codes are not human readable, the person using the QR code generator would likely not notice the issue until it was too late and money was transferred to the scammer’s wallet instead of their own.