I recently purchased a Roku Streaming Stick 4 K. I scanned the QR code on the box that clearly says Roku on it. I filled in all the information thinking I am signing up for a Roku account and ended up with a subscription to Starller. They want to charge me $49.95/mo after the first 5 days. Why is Roku supporting this scam?
Was it a sticker on the box? Where did yo buy it? Can you post a picture of the box? Searching for "Starller" definitely comes up with a lot of scam reports.
There’s a QR code on the bottom of my Roku box which appears to be a Serial Number. Pointing my cell phone at it shows the same SN so that seems perfectly innocent.
However, if I tap on the scanned serial number, the phone then asks which browser I would like to complete that action in. So I picked one, and it launched that browser with a search for my Roku serial number.
With my chosen browser and chosen search engine, the first match/guess was Apple Support. (Which might make you guess that I’m using an iPhone and/or Safari but I’m not. It was Bing in Firefox on Android that somehow selected Apple Support as a good guess for my serial number.) It wouldn’t surprise me at all if other phones/browsers/search histories produced much different results for a search of a serial number. Different serial numbers would also likely produce much different search results.
Oddly enough, the QR code I’m looking at is already a sticker. So renojim is right, that it would be a really easy scam to cover Roku’s sticker with another one. But then again, maybe the OP just searched up a serial number like I did…
After I finished my experimentation, I turned off “Google Lens suggestions” in my camera app, so now my QR codes are not interpreted at all.
