Imagine this: You can swipe a smart payment card through parking meter, and reload it online or even automatically. Or…how’s this one?: You can park your car anytime WITHOUT parking fees!! Do those ideas ever crossed your mind?

Well, if so, i guess hackers at this year’s Black Hat security conference shall make your dream come true. You see, they recently claimed to have created a fake payment card that can disguise itself quite well in front of San Francisco’s 23.000 electronic parking meters.

Since all this $1000 fake card does is replay the payment signals of an authentic card, it took only about 3 days of recording the electromagnetic waves that were generated when a real card was used on a parking meter using an oscilloscope, and a little trial and error of making a copy that would play back the same waveforms to trick a parking meter into accepting it as a payment, to create it. At least that’s what researcher Joe Grand said.

However, these cards are available only in San Fransisco for now, because each city’s meters require different reverse engineering process to hack. Yet “Lost hope we shan’t..!”, for the ‘bright side’ is; most electronic parking meters are also assumed to be vulnerable to some form of card tampering.