ICYMI: Nate's credit card Skimmer Scanner app

One small step for credit security...

Over the past few months, Nate has been working with a local law enforcement agency here in Colorado to reverse-engineer the hardware used in gas pumps to skim your credit cards. Turns out, the hardware found in some Colorado gas pumps is used by fraudsters nationwide, and can be detected via Bluetooth.

Nate and his SparkX team wrote a free app you can download here to make it easy for anyone with an Android phone to make sure your credit card information is secure at the gas pump.

So far, there have been over 38,000 downloads of the app from the Google Play store! If you've found a skimmer using the app, tweet at us (@sparkfun) with the zip code where you detected one using the hashtag #skimmerscanner. If we get enough results, we can eventually use the zip codes to generate a map that will show us how widespread the use of skimmers actually is, without compromising individual users' privacy or exact location.

You can read Nate's full breakdown of the hardware below, and learn more about his investigative tactics.

Hopefully the Skimmer Scanner app can get us one step closer to credit card security by encouraging a community of makers in the field to combat credit fraud.