Fake ETA Sites and QR Codes Target Travellers
Bastillepost · 1 SOURCESabout 3 hours ago2 MIN
Summary
Travel fraud is increasingly shifting from obvious street scams to administrative steps that travellers tend to trust, including ticket bookings, entry applications and official-looking payment requests. Between 2024 and 2025, many users on Reddit said they searched online for the United Kingdom Electronic Travel Authorisation, clicked top-ranked links and landed on websites that closely resembled official pages. The official ETA fee was listed as £10, but some applicants later found they had been charged as much as £85 in added “administrative” costs. The report also says fake payment QR-code stickers have appeared at airports overseas, where travellers scanning them risk exposing their credit-card details.
Key Points
- The scam pattern described involves fraudsters exploiting travellers’ trust in “official procedures” rather than relying on older face-to-face tourist traps.
- Reddit posts from 2024 to 2025 described UK ETA applicants clicking sponsored or top search results that led to highly convincing imitation websites.
- In the cited UK ETA cases, the official application fee was £10, yet some victims were charged up to £85 in extra handling fees.
- Hong Kong’s Consumer Council warned in a 2019 issue of Choice that travellers applying for Australia or Canada ETA permits could be diverted to lookalike third-party sites.
- Those third-party sites were said to charge several times, or even ten times, official fees, with risks including failed applications, no refunds and personal-data leaks.
Why It Matters
For Hong Kong travellers, the danger is that losses may not be obvious at the moment of payment, especially when the amount first appears manageable and the process looks official. By the time overcharging, invalid permits or card-data misuse is discovered, victims may already be overseas and face limited options for immediate help.