The Coinbase Super Bowl ad sparked several conversations in my family. My son in college used the QR code to sign up to buy cryptocurrency, something he had been interested in for a while. My mother-in-law mistakenly scanned the code wondering what she could get for free. My husband scanned the code to get more information. Only my college-age daughter wondered if it was safe to click. Yes, our family contributed to the more than 20 billion people scanning the code, according to PC magazine.
But I was more than a bit shocked at normalizing behavior that scammers used. I spend my waking hours warning people not to click links that they don’t know where they go. And when I logged on the next morning, I realized that I was not alone. Other cybersecurity experts were wondering the same thing. PC Magazine proclaimed the ad a “security nightmare.” It worked, though. The ad and promotion were even more popular than Coinbase expected, and the response crashed the Coinbase app temporarily.
Just like security experts constantly warn us not to click on unknown links, the same principle applies to QR codes. They are essentially a link embedded in an image. If you click a QR code from an unknown source, it’s exactly the same as clicking an unknown link. By showing a QR code during the most watched sporting event of the year — and making it flash colors and dance — was Coinbase normalizing risky behavior and setting up people to be victims of phishing?
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