Tracking a Bluetooth Skimmer Gang in Mexico (Part I)

While waiting for part 2, I&#x27;m wondering if this is not a very dangerous thing to be investigating. Working in a foreign country with criminal organizations (though maybe less in tourist parts of Cancun) and actively and personally interfering with a presumably lucrative funding source of said organizations seems like a bad idea.<p>Is this just my US-centric view of the world saying this or is it really a questionable move if one values their personal safety?<p>Anyway this is very much the topic of more than one novel I&#x27;m sure and given he has survived to blog the tale I guess I can be less concerned about his welfare.

Well, they weren&#x27;t that sophisticated if they left the bluetooth device transmitting. Pretty stupid if you ask me.<p>If it were me, I would have either:<p>1. Require a secret pin to be entered in order to activate the bluetooth. 2. Don&#x27;t use bluetooth. For example the nRF51822 chip (e.g. in this module [1] allows you to implement your own radio protocols. You could make it impossible to detect - it could only respond when send a secret code of some sort.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seeedstudio.com&#x2F;depot&#x2F;Seeed-Micro-BLE-Module-w-CortexM0-Based-nRF51822-SoC-p-1975.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seeedstudio.com&#x2F;depot&#x2F;Seeed-Micro-BLE-Module-w-Co...</a>

Why can&#x27;t we get ATMs with chip slots so that we don&#x27;t have to present a skimming device with a nice long swipe?<p>And once more I consider scraping the mag-stripe off my debit card.