02 Apr Product Review: Skim Scan Card Skimmer Detector
Handheld device helps law enforcement turn the tables on skimmer gangs
–Melbourne, Australia – Apr. 2, 2025
Scott Schober didn’t want to have to develop Skim Scan – but after thieves stole his credit-card number at a New York City parking garage a few years ago, he began thinking about how he could help other people avoid being caught out by a similar problem.
Short on cash and racing to get to an interview, he recalls, “I reluctantly pulled out my card and put it into one of those payment machines so I could park quickly and run up so I wasn’t late.”
Within a day or so, he said, “I started having suspicious charges, and traced it back – and sure enough, it was from a skimmer in one of those parking machines. I cancelled the card, got the money back, no big deal – but it just drove me nuts.”
Schober, a security expert who works as president and CEO of New Jersey-based Berkeley Varitronics Systems (BVS), is far from the only one: increasingly sophisticated skimmers – diminutive electronic devices that criminals insert into the card slots of ATMs, gas pumps, parking and other payment devices – have become so common in recent years that raids of machines suspected to be compromised inevitably turn up one or many of the devices.
Secret Service raids regularly identify skimmers, with one recently reported audit of 879 Washington, D.C.-area businesses identifying 27 skimmers spread across 6561 point-of-sale terminals, gas pumps, and ATMs inspected – preventing an estimated loss of $7.2 million.
Another recent raid in San Diego tested over 800 payment devices and identified 21 skimming devices, preventing estimated financial losses of $63 million.
FICO last year reported that the number of debit cards compromised by skimmers soared in 2022 and increased a further 96% in 2023, with over 315,000 impacted cards and nearly 1600 skimming incidents identified – and the number of cards captured by each skimmer up 39%.
Cybercriminals not only use stolen card details to buy products, but sell them on darkweb sites where a reported 269 million card records were posted last year alone.
There had to be an easier way
One of the biggest challenges finding skimmers is their diminutive size, with contemporary models – which are widely available for purchase on darkweb sites, where criminals also trade schematics illustrating how to build their own devices – so thin that they can be completely inserted into card slots where unsuspecting consumers and merchants have no idea their card details are being taken.
Detecting and removing the devices often requires experienced technicians to take apart a suspected compromised ATM or other machine, navigating a morass of wires and circuit boards in what Schober – whose research took him to the field to experience the process hands-on – called a “very tedious” process of “tracing wires, pulling things, and moving things around.”
“It’s a rat’s nest in a lot of these machines,” he explained. “They’re not designed to be easily worked on, and there’s just stuff shoved in there.”
Schober’s experience as a skimmer victim led him to engage with the BVS engineering team to spitball ways that the devices could be reliably detected even where they were effectively invisible.
After a process of “hardcore R&D” – which included buying and dismantling many used ATMs and point-of-sale terminals online – the team recognized that the common thread with the skimmers was that they had their own read head to take data off of the card as it’s inserted.
“You know exactly where the normal read head is,” Schober explained, “so if there’s a second one before or after it, we realized that we could probably detect that.”
And so Skim Scan was born.
Finding the unfindable, in seconds
Designed for simplicity and speed, the handheld device includes a credit card-sized appendage that authorities can insert into the card slot of a suspect machine; if a second magnetic read head is detected, a red LED lights up to alert the user of the skimmer’s presence.
Extensive testing proved that the device worked – but getting the word out proved to be a challenge at first, with scattershot sales until a large gas-station franchise chain approached BVS because it had heard that Skim Scan might be able to help.
“They bought one, then came back and bought more, and we’ve subsequently sold several hundred units to them,” Schober said, noting that the device’s success snowballed even further after several mid-sized banks and credit unions “were getting clobbered with skimmers”.
Once the banks started probing their devices with Skim Scan, however, Schober said “they started pulling out lots of skimmers – and recommending it to their competitors, other credit unions, and other banks.”
Helping small businesses fight back
Evidence suggests that skimmer gangs, many of which hail from Romania and have been disrupted by authorities in places like St Louis; Fresno and Glendale, Calif.; and Maryland – target individual banks at a time because they use the same type of equipment across dozens or hundreds of branches.
This ensures the compatibility of skimmers inserted into any of the machines, which are mapped using the likes of Google Maps and systematically rotated through the sites.
“It’s pretty well-orchestrated and organized gangs that do this type of stuff,” Schober said, “and of these crazy scams, most of them start with skimmers.”
Yet where skimmer gangs once thrived in the obscurity of devices that were being regularly installed and removed without shopkeepers’ knowledge – allowing them to take an average of $114,000 from cards stolen from a single gas pump – the ready availability of Skim Scan has given those small business owners a way to protect customers by rooting out the fraudulent devices early on.
Increasing adoption by regulatory agencies, individual business owners and area law-enforcement authorities – the Goodland, Kansas police are another recent customer – is getting Skim Scan devices into the places the gangs are most likely to target.
“They’re going out there into the communities and checking gas pumps and ATMs,” Schober said. “It’s nice to see that law enforcement are getting some credit for keeping people safe and keeping their wallets and purses protected from skimmers that cyber thieves are putting in machines.”
“It’s a nice win-win from a community perspective.”
– David Braue is an award-winning technology writer based in Melbourne, Australia.
