SkimGuard Data Licensing
Community-powered, continuously updated, and geographically indexed — the SkimGuard dataset gives fraud analysts, payment networks, insurers, and financial institutions actionable intelligence on card-skimmer activity across the United States.
What the data is
Every time a SkimGuard user scans a payment terminal, that scan — with its verdict, location, timestamp, and confidence score — is added to the SkimGuard verification corpus. Community scans are cross-validated against hardware-scanner submissions from enrolled business operators, producing a continuously refreshed, geographically indexed view of payment-environment safety across gas stations, ATMs, retail locations, and other card-accepting terminals nationwide.
Records reflect actual wireless detections at the terminal — not estimates modeled from financial transaction records.
Every record is geohash-indexed and tied to a stable internal location UUID, decoupled from third-party place IDs.
Hardware scans from business operators are proximity-validated before they enter the corpus.
This is the direct output of patent-pending wireless-signal classification — available nowhere else, and not inferred from transaction data.
Transaction data tells you fraud already happened. This dataset identifies the physical threat first.
The dataset
A consistent, query-ready schema spanning location identity, detection verdict, freshness, and the wireless protocol observed.
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Location UUID | Stable internal identifier, decoupled from third-party place IDs |
| Geohash | ~10m-precision geographic cell |
| Location type | Fuel retail, ATM, grocery, retail POS, or other |
| Safety tier | Verified / Aging / Stale / Alert / New |
| Verdict | SAFE / WARN / ALERT, with a confidence score |
| Last scan timestamp | UTC recency, used for freshness calculation |
| Alert timestamp | When an alert verdict was first recorded |
| Scan source | Consumer mobile (anonymized), B2B mobile, B2B agent or B2B hardware |
| Protocol detected | BLE / classic BT / other |
| State / Metro area | Geographic roll-up fields for aggregate analysis |
Field availability and granularity vary by license tier. Exact fields and schema are provided to qualified licensees under NDA.
Who licenses this data
The SkimGuard dataset fills a gap transaction data alone cannot: it identifies the physical threat before fraud occurs.
Correlate cardholder disputes against a terminal's SkimGuard alert history, surface compromised merchant environments early, and steer investigation resources toward high-risk areas.
Enrich merchant risk scoring with real physical-compromise data, flag locations with recurring skimmer activity, and trigger remediation outreach before cardholder fraud spikes.
Add physical-compromise signals as a model feature — a novel, non-correlated input that complements transaction velocity, behavioral biometrics, and device intelligence.
Underwrite card-fraud risk for merchants, fuel retailers, and ATM operators using observed compromise rates at specific locations — actuarial models built on detection history, not claims alone.
Map skimmer activity across geography and time, surface criminal-network signatures from co-located deployments, and support academic and regulatory research on payment security.
Portfolio-level visibility into terminal safety across all affiliated locations, benchmarked against regional and national averages — with support for PCI DSS compliance programs.
License structure
All licenses are negotiated directly. Pricing depends on geographic scope, field set, delivery frequency, and intended use — tell us what you need and we'll structure it.
A single export of the full or filtered dataset at a moment in time. Suited to one-time enrichment, model training, or academic research.
Daily, weekly, or monthly delta feeds of new and updated records. Suited to fraud-scoring systems, risk platforms, and ongoing research.
Query the dataset by location, region, or time window in real time. Suited to scoring pipelines that need sub-second enrichment at transaction time.
Every license includes a data-use agreement, NDA, and defined permitted uses. Law-enforcement and regulatory access is handled separately — see the law-enforcement page.
Get in touch
We work directly with qualified organizations to structure agreements. Tell us about your organization, your use case, and the geographic scope you need — all inquiries are handled confidentially under NDA, with a response within 2 business days.