Squid Game cards are being left on vehicles around Metro Vancouver

Dan Turner found this Squid Game-themed card on his vehicle at Metrotown on October 20. (Dan Turner/Submitted)

Several Metro Vancouver residents have found Squid Game-themed cards on their parked cars this week as some businesses try a new marketing technique that piggybacks on the Netflix show’s popularity.

Dan Turner returned to his parked car in the Metrotown mall parking lot on Wednesday to find a brown card with the recognizable circle, triangle, and square plus a phone number resting on his windshield.

“It was kind of bizarre. I looked around to see if all the cars next to me had one, and they hadn’t been picked,” he told Daily Hive. “I was parked for a while though, so maybe the cars had shuffled by then.”

When Turner shared a photo of his card on Reddit, some people jokingly asked how much debt he was in. A fan of the show himself, he eventually worked up the courage to call the number on the back.

Dan Turner/Submitted

A mechanical voice answers, sounding much like the voice in the show.

“Do you need money? Do you want to participate in the game?” it says, before breaking character and encouraging the caller to participate in local radio station CFOX’s call-in contest.

“We just wanted to make their heart skip a beat,” CFOX’s program director Ronnie Stanton told Daily Hive.

He came up with the idea after watching the thrilling show as a way to garner interest in the station’s Quickdraw game starting next week, where listeners have the chance to win $10,000 if they call at the right time.

“It’s such a phenomenon at the moment, that TV show. We wanted to lean on it and run with it in a fun way,” he said. “And no one’s going to get shot with our little Squid Game. There’s no creepy girl.”

Over Wednesday and Thursday, Stanton’s team placed approximately 2,000 cards on vehicles at Metrotown, Coquitlam Centre, Richmond Centre, Park Royal, and on Robson Street.

“No one was safe from our silliness,” he said, adding that he hopes they touched the hearts of some other fans.

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At least one other local company is distributing Squid Game cards, but it uses QR codes that link to its products instead of a phone number.

Robyn Biggar/Submitted

Robyn Biggar found a Squid Game card tucked in the windowsill of her vehicle outside Gold’s Gym in Port Coquitlam on Tuesday. The QR leads to supplement store NutraBomb, and gives recipients a discount on products.

“Once you show up at the supplement store, you’ll find out the real deal,” a Reddit user replied to Biggar’s post.

Lazar Ilic, owner of NutraBomb, said the company decided to distribute the cards as a way to give locals a discount on products. He’s distributed about 1,000 cards around local gyms, and so far approximately 800 people have clicked through to the link on the back

“Our logo had similarities to the circle design, so we thought we’d do a little spinoff,” he told Daily Hive. “We watched the show and it was obviously a very trending topic right now. Lots of people are involved in the hype.”