Crooks who make and deploy ATM skimmers are constantly engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with financial institutions, which deploy a variety of technological measures designed to defeat skimming devices. The latest innovation aimed at tipping the scales in favor of skimmer thieves is a small, battery powered device that provides crooks a digital readout indicating whether an ATM likely includes digital anti-skimming technology.
A well-known skimmer thief is marketing a product called “Smart Shield Detector” that claims to be able to detect a variety of electronic methods used by banks to foil ATM skimmers.
The device, which sells for $200, is called a “Smart Shield Detector,” and promises to detect “all kinds of noise shields, hidden shields, delayed shields and others!”
It appears to be a relatively simple machine that gives a digital numeric indicator of whether an ATM uses any of a variety of anti-skimming methods. One of the most common is known as “frequency jamming,”...(continued)
