THE owner of multiple seafront businesses has slammed scammers targeting residents parking in Southend and urged council bosses to take action.

Southend Council has issued a series of warnings over the last month about a scam in the city’s car parks, where fake signs are placed on pay-and-display machines to catch out drivers.

Philip Miller, whose firm Stockvale runs both Adventure Island and Sealife Adventure, spoke out yesterday after finding one of the fake signs in the Fairheads Green car park.

He swiftly ripped off the fake QR code before warning residents and urging the council to take action.

“An alerted customer at Sealife Adventure brought it to our attention,” he said.

“I promptly went out and peeled the illegal QR codes off of the machines.

“Going forward, the council have an army of traffic wardens riding around, maybe they could check these machines and do something to actually help customers.

“The council also have a fantastic state-of-the-art CCTV monitoring system that should be able to identify the thieves quite easily”.

On Facebook, a spokesman for Sealife Adventure also warned residents and visitors to “be vigilant”.

A QR code, which is an abbreviation of quick response code, is a barcode which enables people to get rapid access to a website or download link by scanning it with their phone camera.

They have become an increasingly common way for legitimate parking payments to be made.

Southend Council issued numerous warnings about fraudulent QR codes in October after genuine parking signs were covered up with the fake codes, directing users to convincing but dangerous websites.

At the time, the council launched an investigation to identify how many machines in Southend may have been targeted by fraudsters.

Labour leader of Southend Council, Daniel Cowan, said: “This is a scam.

“Southend-on-Sea City Council does not use QR codes to ask you to pay for parking or download pay by phone apps.

“The only QR codes we use related to parking are on adverts for the Southend Pass, which link to the Southend Pass webpages on our corporate website www.southend.gov.uk but again, these legitimate QR codes do not take you to a payment page”.