The people installing these skimmers aren't the ones writing firmware for them. They have been mass produced in China and sold around the world. There might be

The people installing these skimmers aren't the ones writing firmware for them. They have been mass produced in China and sold around the world. There might be a v2 in the works that works better or is more difficult to detect but people will still be buying the original version because it does the job and works well enough to get at least some cards before being found. It is similar to the OBDII reader chip, ELM327. Elm made a decent v1.0 release for their PIC-based ELM327 and forgot to lock down the firmware. Everyone then proceeded to make pirate clones of the reader. It is much easier to just keep producing the exact same chip/firmware combo than it would be to actually go back and decompile/write new code to add some stealth features that aren't going to make your new v2.0 sell any better over the cheaper than dirt v1.0.