Author: Tyler Winegarner / Source: Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers
Build a dashboard gadget that scans constantly for potential gas pump card skimmers
What’s worse than gazing over your credit card statement and seeing payments you didn’t authorize? You frantically mark up your statement with a red pen before you make that call to your bank, hoping that they’ll reinstate the funds after freezing your card!
The root of this vulnerability is the completely insecure nature of credit cards themselves. The traditional magnetic stripe on your card contains all the data necessary to complete a transaction, and because it’s not encrypted, this data can easily be stolen using simple electronics. So-called “card skimmer” devices deployed by crooks act like a “man-in-the-middle,” intercepting and recording your credit card data before passing it along to the point-of-sale machine, like a gas station fuel pump.
Last year, Nathan Seidle of SparkFun Electronics did a technical deep-dive of credit card skimmers that had been extracted from fuel pumps by his local police force. The result was an app, released for Android and iPhone, that will scan for Bluetooth devices matching the fingerprint of the skimmers he researched.
That’s all well and good, but I’m lazy, and slow to develop beneficial habits. I wanted a dedicated, ambient appliance that would always be on the lookout for suspicious Bluetooth devices at the gas station, and would shout at me before I did something stupid with my financial future. However, credit where credit is due, this project wouldn’t exist without Seidle’s hard work.
1. HARDWARE
There are only two components for this build, a Raspberry Pi Zero W and the Adafruit SSD1306 OLED display.
First you’ll solder the connections for the OLED. When we package it up, you don’t want a lot of slack in the wires, so keep them as short as possible, and use something with plenty of flex: solid 28-gauge wire keeps things manageable, and stranded wire makes it even easier. The SSD1306 supports two different communication protocols: I2C and SPI. We’ll be using the latter — it uses a few more wires, but it’s faster. Wire everything up according to this diagram .
Getting a monitor and keyboard connected to a Pi Zero requires a ton of extra hardware, so I always like to start off with a nice headless setup. The easiest way to do this right from the start is to use the delightful block-based Raspberry Pi setup tool, Pi Bakery. It lets you create a…
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