Stripe Snoop Logo
Why is Stripe Snoop Important?

Open your wallet. How many cards in there have magstripes on them? Three? Four? Five? Ever wonder what was encoded on them?

I know I did. I had six cards in my wallet with magstripes. One day a friend of mine had a $200 Magstripe reader, so I ran my cards through. Aside from the expected credit card numbers, I was surprised by the amount of personal information encoded on them. In fact, for reasons I still don't know, 2 cards contained my social security number.

Magstripes are everywhere in the United States. Aside from a few academic papers and hacking articles, very little information is published about them. So I went about trying to locating a reader system to do research with. I learned that while there magstripe readers and software available to the public, they suffer some pretty serious problems. Stripe Snoop was created to solve these issues that the manufactures don't deem important.