Comments on: Magstripe Snooping

By: John

John — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 08:43:50 +0000

I just built this project and it works very well. While the two comments above are valid the main point of this project is cost. Commercial magnetic card readers usually cost over $70.00 (although you can find deals on ebay). I purchased my reader for under $10.00. Also the free Strip Snoop software does a pretty good job of identifying the card and deciphering the content.

Plus if you’re the DIY type this project is fun and easy, I have learned much about the information I share using my cards.

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 04:36:19 +0000

At work (I’m a registration clerk at a hospital) we have card readers to read people’s ID numbers from their health cards. They just hook into a PS/2 port, with a pass-through for the actual keyboard.

When they were first installed, they would just dump everything on a card through the keyboard. Now they just grab the number part from health cards, but before, it was fun to swipe other things (Visa cards, driver’s licenses, etc) just to see what data was on ‘em.

By: das7282

das7282 — Sat, 18 Jun 2005 15:44:25 +0000

I use mag readers at work (on our POS systems which are only mATX Celeron boxes running a striped down version of Win98 and the POS software sitting on top). While I’m not sure why you had a model that you had to connect to a game port because almost ever model I’ve seen connects to a PS2 port and the system sees it as a keyboard.

And because the system sees it as a keyboard all you need to “read” the information off a strip is an app that can read text such as notepad or Microsoft Word.

I was amazed when I found out all I had to do was open notepad, swipe my credit card and all the information would be entered into notepad instantly (not encrypted).

I’m assuming if you found a USB mag strip reader you could do the same thing on a Mac with TextEdit.