Despite the introduction of “chip and PIN” technology elsewhere and all the talk of near field communications (NFC) and wireless payments here, the US payment card system has not changed significantly since the magnetic stripe was added to cards in the 1960s. To understand why skimming is such a problem, you have to understand the nature of the standard credit or debit card. Magnetic card data: what’s in your wallet? But at the level of the card itself, any wholesale move away from the magnetic stripe remains years off, mostly due to the lack of financial incentive for card issuers and merchants to invest in the new tech, and because of the long life cycles of ATMs and point-of-sale systems. To fight the trend, banks have answered with counter-skimming technology-everything from sensors that detect devices being attached to card readers to jammers that block external readers from recording and transmitting card data. “That’s obviously something we’d like to defeat,” he added. While chip-and-PIN-based ATMs and point-of-sale systems have reduced the volume of skimming fraud in Europe, Johnson says that the US has become the “preferred place to cash out” for skimmers from around the globe. Credit and debit cards in other parts of the world still use the magnetic stripe, of course, but in many places only as a backup to “smart” chip systems commonly referred to as “chip and PIN” or “EMV” (for EuroPay, MasterCard, and Visa, the companies driving cryptographically equipped smart cards in Europe and elsewhere). The US explosion in skimming has been driven, in part, by the low-tech nature of most US credit cards, which are still tethered to the same technology used for nearly 50 years: the magnetic stripe. That ring took in $1.2 million in cash as fake credit cards were used to purchase handbags, watches, and other luxury goods to be resold. And one larger criminal organization in New York was paying waiters to collect their well-heeled customers’ credit card data last year with hand-held card readers. Self-checkout machines at grocery stores have been targeted, too. Skimmers now attach card readers to gas pumps across the US, capturing both credit and debit card data. By then, according to later admissions in court, the two men had amassed over $280,000 in fraudulent withdrawals and transactions-most of which were sent to relatives back in Bulgaria. But the second skimming trip had a different conclusion New York City police caught Ivanov and Stamatov as they were removing their gear from an ATM machine at the Chase branch at 785 Broadway (Iordan escaped back to Canada). The road trip proved so successful that the two men returned to New York again in May 2011, this time bringing Ivanov’s younger brother Iordan along for the ride. After this bit of fun, the duo went on a cross-country withdrawal spree using clones made from their victims' cards, pulling over $264,000 in cash from machines in Arizona, Illinois, and Canada. But Ivanov and Stamatov benefitted from a new generation of skimming technology that has turned the once-difficult crime into a mass-market business. Using pre-fabricated gear perfectly matched to the hardware of Chase Bank ATMs, they were able to read the magnetic stripe off of victims' cards and even record victims punching in their PINs. Skimming isn’t new-it’s been around almost as long as ATM machines. Their five-day visit to Manhattan’s East Village and Astor Place wasn’t your typical tourist trek, though instead of Statue of Liberty souvenirs, the pair collected the card data and personal identification numbers for over 1,100 ATM cards. Textfiles.In January 2011, a pair of Bulgarian-born Canadians named Nikolai Ivanov and Dimitar Stamatov took a road trip from their home in Quebec to New York City.Python script to decode Aiken Biphase from a WAV fileĬount Zero's canonical walkthrough of magstripe technology from Phrack 37 More sources Modern cards are usually Aiken Biphase (aka F2F). It's pretty easy to build a reader that uses a soundcard's DAC to capture the signal, by wiring a tape-head from a cassette player to an audio plug, and using a ruler to line up the tape head as you run it along the desired track. Magnetic card readers capable of decoding the data formats used for credit cards are available pretty cheaply on the Internet, but for arbitrary formats you might need the raw data on the card.
TI-59 magnetic card (saves programs from programmable calculator).