When a man in Germany tried to score a personalized bottle of Heinz by scanning the label’s QR code, he actually loaded a webpage full of porn. The promo apparently ran from 2012 to 2014 — and, embarrassingly for Heinz, the company didn’t hold onto the URL once it ended, and a porn site called FunDorado snatched it up. To make sure this wasn’t some mistake (an iPhone virus — that happens all the time, right?), Daniel Korell says that he tried the code with “several phones” and even triple-checked by manually entering address. Sure enough, he saw porn every single time. “I’ll probably suffer no permanent damage,” he wrote in a Facebook exchange with Heinz.
Traumatized or (probably) not, Korell came out all right in the end: Not only did Heinz respond to his post and offer to mail a bottle he could customize, but FunDorado made an obligatory EZ Squirt joke and offered Korell a free yearlong pass to its site.
Really, though, this is just another reminder how pointless these QR codes are, because it’s unclear which is worse: having a porn site assume the old web address, or it taking months before somebody actually scanned the code and made the discovery.
[UPI]