Having lived in China for five years and seeing how it is done there (literally everywhere), I see this as a payment problem. There is no sensible, low cost payment infrastructure to support this safely. Instead most of the west has a fractured app ecosystem where each app ‘does payment’ rather than via a set of trusted payment apps that do the security up front and then passes to the provider. For example, in the article the photos show an anonymous QR code you’d scan with your camera, rather than in China where you’d use Alipay or WeChat, whose app you’d use to scan the QR. When I returned from China, it took a while to readjust to the heightened (and often expensive) friction of payments. Not saying scams don’t exist in China, just that the payment provider gives some guarantees on the veracity of the claim made by the QR code