The article is poorly written. "Scammers are using cellphone's Bluetooth option to hack the pump - and get it for free." is all the detail you get. My cellphone's Bluetooth doesn't have that option.
This sentence doesn't know if it's in the local paper or at a slam poetry reading:
"Paying at the pump is for chumps - when you can get gas for free - and illegal, but it didn’t stop a Detroit man from stealing almost 800 gallons of gas at the Shell at Eight Mile and Wyoming."
If you're on android, there's a bunch of bluetooth-serial apps that let you send more or less whatever raw data you want.
On iOS, there's nrf connect. Which is slightly more limited, but can still do BLE. I think there's other bluetooth-serial apps for iphones, but apple has a stick up their butt about bluetooth-classic not working super good unless the other device has a "made for i" chip/cert in it.
If either of these don't work well enough, ESP32s can be had for <$5 and can act as a bridge between your device and whatever you want to exploit.
> On iOS, there's nrf connect. Which is slightly more limited, but can still do BLE. I think there's other bluetooth-serial apps for iphones, but apple has a stick up their butt about bluetooth-classic not working super good unless the other device has a "made for i" chip/cert in it.
Is BLE why "modern" iphones don't have issues with android/3rd party devices/accessories? I remember a long time ago when an iPhone meant you could only share bluetooth with other Apple devices. My iPhone today doesn't seem to be like that.
Kinda. From reading the docs, apple really didn't want the battery drain and software jank that came with classic bluetooth. Pretty sure bluetooth audio has been exempt most of the time though.
You have to enable the DevTools, but that requires a $99 annual fee. If you can't afford gas, it's not likely you can afford that fee too. So it's kind of a perfect catch-22
Why would you have to enable devtools? Also, with just an unpaid icloud account, you can build, sign, and install apps to devices with an expiry time of one week.
It's better to just return it to a different gas station. Selling gas is more difficult than you might think because of rampant dilution/adulteration in the secondary market. Can't just go door to door saying "Hey I bought too much gas" or "My car only takes 93 octane" -- nobody trusts anyone anymore.
When you make a return without a receipt you generally just get store credit instead of cash. If you don't need some chips and tallboys, you can typically sell the credit to someone behind the station for .3 to .4 of the face value. That isn't great but since the gaming machines only take cash its a solid way to get liquid.
Just act normal and ask for the manager. Like the parent comment noted "probably very much worth the small investment in tools." Be sure to get one of the fancy black rubber hoses instead of the green ones so things look more professional.
"Paying at the pump is for chumps - when you can get gas for free - and illegal, but it didn’t stop a Detroit man from stealing almost 800 gallons of gas at the Shell at Eight Mile and Wyoming."