BlueSMiRF found in credit card sniffer

SparkFun BlueSMiRF found in credit card sniffer, interesting Sparkfun product placement. Nate writes –

That is an officer of the law holding up a device that was found within a ‘PIN pad’ in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. I didn’t know what a PIN pad is, so here’s a wikipedia article and google images. From the article (November 5th, 2009), it looks like someone has found a couple serial pins on the hand-held credit card reader commonly used within Canadian retail stores. They’ve wired those pins to a BlueSMiRF. This allows a person sitting ~100 feet away to see all the serial traffic including all the credit card information and pin #s. Not hard – all it takes is a bit of time, and malicious intent… All things can be used for good or evil, including our products. You can build amazing things that encourage children to learn (checkout Gever Tulley’s amazing presentation at TED), or you can build things that steal. We believe that sharing knowledge and selling products that encourage innovation outweigh the inherent dangers. We believe that stifling innovation or suppressing knowledge lead to much more dangerous outcomes.

Thing about this scam is that the person(s) who modified the device needed a lot of access to the device(s) and then they need to hang around 100ft away all the time… inside job? Either way, the more this story gets out the more people will know about it.