More than 1,000 QR-coded stickers were mysteriously put on gravestones and wooden crosses at three cemeteries in Germany.
When scanned, the codes reveal just the name of the deceased buried in the grave and its location in the Munich cemetery, baffling graveyard staffers until this week, when police finally nabbed the sticky-handed vandals.
A local gardening business, whose name has been withheld, tasked with cleaning the cemetery’s graves was behind the QR codes, police said on Thursday, according to the New York Times.
Alfred Zanker, a senior manager at the unidentified company, explained that the stickers helped his employees keep track of which headstones had already undergone maintenance.
“We are a large company,” he told Munich newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. “Everything has to happen in an orderly manner.”
The appearance of the 1.95×1.2-inch white rectangular QR-coded stickers began in December, but the municipality asked the police to begin investigating them as a criminal case of property damage this week.
That was because it was costing $104 to $523 to remove the adhesives — placed at Waldfriedhof, Sendlinger Friedhof and Friedhof Solln cemeteries — without causing damage to the graves.
Bernd Hoerauf, who oversees the management of Munich’s cemeteries, said he and his staff were baffled by the stickers, which were randomly added to both old and new graves.
“It’s really strange. We thought, ‘What could be the sense of this kind of sticker?’” he told the New York Times.
Cemeteries in Munich do permit the addition of QR codes to headstones to provide loved ones with access to online memorials filled with photographs and other digital keepsakes.
However, those codes are applied to the gravestones via an etching or metal plate.
With Post wires
