A parking ticket can ruin your day.\u00a0With a growing number of lots offering electronic payments, it can be confusing when a text comes in, claiming to be related to your recent travels. However, police are urging drivers to be cautious, as a new scam is targeting Texas residents.<\/p>\n
Folks in San Antonio are reporting an uptick in phony messages dinging their phones at around midnight. Locals have been sharing\u00a0screenshots of them on social media, with posts showing a photo designed to look like it is a traffic violation from the City of Dallas Municipal Court.<\/p>\n
“You are hereby notified that immediate action is required to prevent further legal and administrative consequences,” the fraudulent letter states.<\/p>\n
The Dallas Police Department (PD) announced<\/a> an\u00a0investigation into the messages this month. The agency says it is a scam, and recipients should not follow the instructions in the letter.<\/p>\n The message asks the receiver to immediately pay “all outstanding fines, tolls, civil penalties, and court costs” or to “appear before the court at the scheduled hearing” to address the non-existent matter. It attempts to spark concern in the receiver by threatening that if they do not pay via the provided QR code, they could face\u00a0statutory fines, late penalties, or have a non-renewal hold placed on their vehicle registration.\u00a0<\/p>\n The location of the “hearing”\u00a0included in the photo is a real one, however authorities say the City of Dallas and Municipal Courts never request payments “via unsolicited text messages or QR codes.”<\/p>\n “But it looks so official with the QR code and all,” one Reddit user said<\/a> of the scam. “And the seal and triple border. What a nice PDF they put together.”<\/p>\n Dallas PD says it has gotten reports of individuals “going to Municipal Courts after receiving the message and “making payments through the fraudulent\u00a0QR code.” Those who already sent over funds should contact their bank or credit card company immediately and report the incident to Dallas PD, authorities wrote<\/a> in a statement.<\/p>\n Officers also provided general reminders to Texans: Avoid clicking links or scanning codes\u00a0from unknown or suspicious senders and never provide payment or personal information to a source unless you have verified their identity.<\/p>\n MySA reached out to Dallas PD with a request for comment, but did not\u00a0hear back in time for publication.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A parking ticket can ruin your day.\u00a0With a growing number of lots offering electronic payments, it can be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":229474,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[847,820,27,29,28],"class_list":{"0":"post-229473","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-texas","8":"tag-mysanews","9":"tag-mysastaff","10":"tag-texas","11":"tag-texas-headlines","12":"tag-texas-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229473\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/229474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}