Teens get bank cards for gifts via QR: any risks?
Visitors could obtain gifts like chips and soda at the Pyaterochka pavilion.
The Pyaterochka pavilion drew a constant queue at the festival.
Spin the Wheel
A drum was used for the Apelsin card prize draws at the festival.
At the festival «V Sibiri — Yest!» the Pyaterochka pavilion stood in a prominent spot near the central staircase. Visitors could get a gift simply by installing (or showing already installed) the retailer’s app. To activate it, users needed to enter their mobile phone number. Pyaterochka’s offer was popular, with a constant queue at the pavilion. However, the app was not the only thing. At another location, visitors could take part in a prize draw, but here they had to give consent to receive an Apelsin bank card, said a festival visitor who called herself Tatyana. According to her, even teenagers under 18 could participate in the draw. «Teenagers quickly went through authorization in droves and grabbed their drink and chips. Of course, no one read the documents “via link.” Now parents have one Alfa-Bank card each and consent to the use of their contacts for a whole list of organizations,» Tatyana lamented.
Few card recipients likely even skimmed the terms they agreed to by pressing the button.
How It Works
The festive atmosphere encourages a more relaxed attitude toward online consent.
The Apelsin card can be used as a regular payment card, but also offers additional discounts and bonuses at enterprises belonging to the Alfa financial-industrial group. It also provides discounts at Pyaterochka and Perekrestok chains and promises increased cashback for purchases there. An NGS observer tried scanning the code offered to fair visitors. The link showed a menu with one large gray button «Issue plastic card» and a set of explanations in fine print. According to the promotion terms, the participant «agreed to the issuance of a prepaid card and ordering an Apelsin payment card,» confirmed «familiarization and agreement with the Card Issuance Agreement, Apelsin Loyalty Program Terms, and gave consent to the Partner Bank for processing personal data and linking the bank card and transferring information constituting banking secrecy.»
Only the agreement with Alfa-Bank is 58 pages, where the first 9 are devoted to definitions. But finding the most important thing — the card service fee — was not possible. For that information, one was directed to the bank’s website in the tariffs section.
Also interesting is the «list of advertisers and advertising distributors.» It contains 52 items (26 in each section), but some companies appear in both. These include Alfa-Bank JSC, Blagodarnosti Systems LLC, A-4 Technologies LLC, Alfa Forex LLC, Perekrestok Trading House JSC, etc. One can refuse consent to receive «advertising and other information» from them by unchecking a box, but that requires at least thinking about it. In a situation where a fair visitor is shown prizes and told to «just activate the card,» an unprepared person might not do that, thereby giving consent to include their data in the databases of all these numerous organizations.
What the Companies That Held the Draw Say
The press service of the X5 Group (which owns Pyaterochka) said that at the festival, the Pyaterochka chain organized several entertainment zones. «To visit some locations, you had to select favorite product categories for the month in the Pyaterochka app. For this, new users had to install the app by going through the usual registration process. In the Apelsin zone, promoters invited guests to leave an application for an Apelsin card. At this stage, a full-fledged bank card is not issued,» X5 reported. The press service of Alfa-Bank (issuer of Apelsin cards) confirmed that «at the festival, guests could independently follow a QR code and leave an application for an Apelsin card.» But they emphasized that this is not enough for actual use of the card. «Before identification, the user may have access to a digital version — essentially, an electronic wallet with legally established limits on balance and transactions. For such a product, full client identification is not legally required. To remove the limits and use a full-fledged bank card, the client must undergo identification with a bank representative, who checks the passport and age. Under the product terms, such a card can only be issued from age 18,» the bank clarified. Additionally, as the press service stressed, the card is debit. Issuance and maintenance are free regardless of whether the client uses it or not.
How to View This
The bank’s draw, of course, does not violate the law. Even obtaining a digital version will not allow a teenager to get into debt: first, they would have to get a real card, which requires documents. However, the festival atmosphere, the game-like situation in which the card is issued, and the promise of prizes clearly lower the threshold for critical assessment of what is happening. A person first agrees to start a relationship with a bank (and at the same time with a whole group of companies that will get their phone number), and only then thinks why they actually needed it. Chips and soda are not such a valuable prize. Many of us actually encounter similar situations regularly. Subscribing to any online service is necessarily accompanied by links to contracts, lists of partners, and other information that companies are required to provide to users. But which users, as a rule, do not read. And then they are surprised by spam calls, additional services subscribed in their name, and other troubles that do not contradict the law. Interface designer Elena Belova calls such cases the use of dark patterns.
«These are situations where a person can seemingly refuse some option, but the interface is made so that an inattentive or inexperienced user risks not noticing and ends up subscribed to a service/newsletter, etc.,» the expert notes. According to Elena, in recent years Russian companies have begun using dark patterns much more actively.
Nothing New
Moreover, the method used by Pyaterochka is actually far from new. Even in Novosibirsk, residents could have seen it many times. In the late 2000s, for example, the owners of the Holiday Classic chain decided to quickly grow the client base of another of their businesses — Investment City Bank (IGB). IGB was then actively attracting retail clients by handing out credit cards, and Holiday announced that they would accept them as discount cards. The cards themselves were handed out in stores, and many indeed applied only to get a 5% discount at the supermarket. But some began using them as credit cards, because it was enough to activate the card by making any transaction with it, such as paying for a purchase or withdrawing cash from an ATM. One can view such «tricks» of large business structures differently, but it is worth clearly understanding that this is part of our life. The only thing each of us can really do is think twice before clicking the «agree» button. And if you don’t have time to read long contracts and lists of advertisers to whom you will give your phone number, then perhaps the service you wanted to subscribe to is not really needed either.
The gastronomic festival on Mikhailovskaya Embankment was the largest, but far from the last festival this summer. On July 25, the tenth Siberian Festival of Technical Cultures «Kuvarda Fest» will take place in the science town of Koltsovo. Read what awaits visitors at the festival in a report by an NGS correspondent.
