Could I make a little gun and just walk around through the parking lot and aisles of the supermarket and freeze all the carts in place?
Could I make a little gun and just walk around through the parking lot and aisles of the supermarket and freeze all the carts in place?
Here’s a decent rundown.
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/28/tech-in-plain-sight-shopping-cart-locks/
That was surprisingly interesting.
The hacker who did the Def Con talk linked in the Hackaday article also did another one, they are both very interesting
What’s interesting about these carts is that they only ever seem to be deployed at stores that I wouldn’t think were prone to cart theft, to begin with. They’re always in the nicer neighborhoods at the overpriced stores that nobody should be shopping at in the first place.
Meanwhile, every cart at the stores in the worse neighborhoods look like they’ve been used as target practice for an M1 Abrams tank, have no locks, and can be found scattered on random street corners for a 3 mile radius from the store.
Retailers in wealthier areas have larger budgets, higher profit margins, and more attention by the executives. The favorite managers get assigned to the better stores and regions because obviously it involves better bonuses and better quality of life. They then invest in bullshit security upgrades because they can, and the C-suite believes they work because, well, the managers saying they work were already the favorites.
Retailers in lower income neighborhoods literally can’t afford long-term investments - corporate runs them on razor-thin margins, assigns them the worst managers by default and doesn’t trust those managers, and underpays their staff such that they’re constantly dealing with turnover.
Even if they found the temporary budget to install the security measures, they would still need a permanent budget to maintain them, and it still wouldn’t be worth it because:
One of the proposed features is locking the cart if someone is about to walk out without paying.
The cost of the RF locking wheels isn’t far off the price of a replacement cart. (Not to mention the investment in digging up the entire outline of the lot burying the line.
Because the former location just virtue signal, the latter can’t afford to lose the majority of customers.
Yeah, I just watched a youtuber take apart a modern one. Found the maker and the manual for the system. Then watched some more people taking the system apart (including the one you linked)
Neat stuff:
Looks like it’s <9 Khz signals (7.2khz in the one I looked up), at that frequency, you can do a replay attack using your phones speaker from 0 distance.
the electronics in the wheels are potted, including the battery so they’re disposable at EOL.
Apparently, the unlock signal is just an inverted lock signal. Easily detectable.
Their system has the ability to lock/unlock all carts, only the carts left in the parking lot overnight.
One of the features available is for them to identify and freeze a particular cart if it doesn’t go through a checkout.