PromptPay QR Codes: What You Can Make Yourself and What You Cannot

If you are looking for a tool that generates a PromptPay code from your phone number, stop. Nothing on this site does that, and you should be wary of any free site that offers to.

This explains why, where to get a real one, and what you can legitimately do around it.

Why a payment code has to come from your bank

A Thai payment QR is not just your phone number in a picture. It is a structured record built to the Thai QR Payment standard, carrying the recipient identifier, the account type, and a checksum, in a format the banking network validates before anything moves.

More importantly, the recipient details have to be verified as yours. Your bank knows that a given phone number or ID belongs to your account. A generator on the internet does not, and cannot.

So a site that offers to build one from a number you typed in is either producing something the banking apps will reject, or producing a valid code pointing at whatever account was typed — which is exactly the mechanism behind a whole category of fraud.

Get your code from your own banking app. Every Thai bank has this built in, usually under a "receive money" or "my QR" option. It takes about as long as reading this paragraph, and it is the only version that is definitely yours.

What to check before you print it

• Open the code with your own banking app and confirm the name that appears is you
• Ask a colleague to scan it from a different bank app and confirm the same
• If your bank offers a fixed-amount and an any-amount version, be clear which you have made
• Note whether the code expires — most static receive codes do not, but check

That first check is the important one. The name your app displays is the actual verification, not the pattern.

Displaying one safely

A printed payment code sitting on a counter is a target. The sticker-over-the-real-code trick is the most common QR fraud there is, and payment codes are the most rewarding version of it for whoever does it.

• Make it hard to cover. A code sealed inside an acrylic stand, or printed as part of a laminated sign, is much more work to tamper with than a sticker on a table.
• Check it daily. Someone should physically look at it. Staff need to know that a sticker appearing over the code is an incident.
• Print your shop name next to it, so customers have something to compare against the name their app shows.
• Train staff to say it. "It should say [shop name] on your screen" takes two seconds and defeats the whole attack.
• Prefer a code shown on your own screen for larger amounts, over one stuck to the furniture.

Tell customers to check the name

This is the single most effective thing in this article. A customer who reads the recipient name before confirming cannot be defrauded by a swapped sticker, no matter how good the sticker is.

Put it on the sign: check the name before you confirm. It costs nothing and it protects you as much as them, because a customer defrauded at your counter is your problem regardless of who put the sticker there.

What a free QR generator can do for you

Plenty, just not the payment part:

For a market stall or small shop, a printed card with your payment QR from the bank alongside a link code for everything else covers most of what you need. Our market stall guide has the rest.

If somebody sends you a code to "receive" money

They are lying. Scanning a payment code only ever prepares a payment from your account. There is no such thing as scanning a code to receive money, and any story built around that — a refund, a prize, an overpayment being returned — is a fraud in progress.

Printing tips that do apply

Everything about print quality applies to a bank-issued code exactly as it does to ours:

• Do not shrink it below 2 × 2 cm, and 4 cm is better on a counter
• Keep the white margin — see the quiet zone guide
• Matte, not glossy; a glossy code under a counter light is a mirror
• Do not recolour it or crop it to fit a design
• Print one and scan it before making fifty