Hunter Cat

Hunter Cat is a magnetic stripe head detector. Ever wonder if a hidden card skimmer is installed on a device you want to use? The hunter cat will detect the number of magnetic stripe heads inside of a card reader and presents simple user feedback via LEDs – Ok, warning, or dangerous. With this information, the user could proceed or not depending on the alert LEDs.

The Hunter Cat runs over a SAMD11 with a CR2032 3V battery. According to Atmel SAM D11 datasheet, SAM D11 is a series of low-power microcontrollers using the 32-bit ARM® Cortex®-M0+ processor, and ranging from 14- to 24-pins with 16KB Flash and 4KB of SRAM. The SAM D11 devices operate at a maximum frequency of 48MHz and reach 2.46 Coremark/MHz.

The Hunter Cat board design has the same dimensions of a bank card. The only difference is that the Hunter Cat board is a little bit longer. The position of the magstripe hunters are in the same position of a normal magnetic stripe. The design follows the most important physical characteristics of ISO 7810/7816 for positioning. The Hunter Cat has four small pieces of metal in the front side. Those will be useful to interact with the sensors at some ATMs that detect the chip metal as trigger to open the compartment to insert the card.

The position of the magstripe triggers and the pieces of metal in the front side of the board will not affect the ATM reader or magstripe reader functionality. The pieces of metal that act as chip trigger to trick the ATM sensor are NOT connected to any voltage or signal to avoid any issues internally.