A guy from Germany got a rude shock when he scanned the QR of a Heinz Ketchup bottle, only to find out that the link generated led to a porn site. Initially, the QR code was for a promotion to design your own label and was ran between 2012 and 2014.
David Korell posted a picture of the ketchup bottle and the phone which displayed the site to Heinz Tomato Ketchup’s official Facebook page. He posted a caption saying how the ketchup is not really for minors and he tested several phones with QR code readers and they all got the same result. Apparently, the QR code was for a contest and the freed up domain that was left by the contest was taken up by the porn website.
The company’s social media team was apologetic and offered to send a new bottle free of charge with an additional bonus of customizing his own label on it. Funny enough, the porn site offered the guy a free subscription to the site
QR have become quite common nowadays in products and especially as an advertising tool, where due to its fast nature, consumers can obtain a company’s website fast by scanning it with a QR code reader. They are used in tickets, apps, product packaging, loyalty cards, magazines, website logins, cryptographic currency (Like Bitcoin) and in other applications that require encryption.
This incident should be a wakeup call to companies right now who use QR codes in their products to periodically check the links generated by those codes so that they remain valid and prevent incidences like this.
Source: The Local
