The StopShort gas station on the corner of 3rd and East first noticed something amiss when they ran due diligence on their transactions and noticed that only gas and snacks bought with cash had been paid for. At first, they suspected an employee of theft, but the shortfalls from credit and debit purchases cut across all their workers. Worse, 8 out of the 10 StopShort locations in Tecumseh County were affected–too many for even a large conspiracy of workers. What’s more, the transactions were supposed to be secure, with cashiers having little input at all into the process.

Baffled, the StopShort approached the local authorities. It soon came out that over a hundred gas stations and retail outlets in the tri-county area had been affected, with losses in the millions. No rhyme or reason could be found–the credit companies insisted that they had never gotten any information from the transactions, and banks with debit cards reported the same. But customers’ bills displayed the charges, albeit under the strangely generic descriptor “point of sale payment.”

It wasn’t until an investigator noticed a key detail that there was a break in the case: all of the credit machines were made by the same company.

Aftermarket models designed for small businesses, the machines used the existing high-speed internet architecture to send information with a proprietary encryption. In theory, the encryption was impossible to break without the key, but the thief had hit upon a much more elegant solution. The company that made the readers, a local outfit called ScanSmart Technologies, had gone out of business in 2008, amid the global recession. That made little difference to their customers–in fact, it broadened their base considerably when the market was flooded with liquidated machines, which could be had for as little as $1 each (provided at least 500 were ordered, naturally).

Someone had bought hundreds of the machines, and rewritten the internal software to redirect the money to their own shell account. Then, posing as a service technician, they had replaced the machines and let the money roll in.

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