The origin
Safe Signals LLC was founded by Joe Gilkey, who spent more than five years as Head of IT at King Kullen Grocery Co., Inc. — one of the largest independent grocery chains in the United States. In that role, Joe had direct responsibility for payment terminal infrastructure across all retail locations.
He saw skimming attacks happen firsthand. He saw the angry customers, and the quiet reality that by the time anyone noticed, hundreds of cards had already been compromised. And he was frustrated by a simple fact: the only detection method available was asking employees to visually inspect terminals — a method that is fundamentally inadequate against skimming hardware designed to be invisible.
Skimming devices communicate wirelessly. They announce themselves via Bluetooth and RF to exfiltrate stolen card data. The signals were there. Nobody was listening for them.
The thesis
SkimGuard taught us something broader than skimming. The reason nobody had solved it wasn't that it was technically hard — it was that the people affected weren't a lucrative enough market to build for properly. That turns out to be true almost everywhere you look.
Volunteer fire departments face the same accountability requirements as career departments on a fraction of the budget, so they get enterprise software with the price cut off. Families caring for aging parents are coordinating medical care across siblings and states using group texts and a shoebox of documents. These are not small groups. They're just not the groups software gets built for.
So that's the thesis: find people carrying something heavy, and build them the tool nobody bothered to build. The gas pump, the fireground, and the kitchen table are the first three. They won't be the last.
How we operate
Safe Signals is an independent, bootstrapped company. We build for the long term, we move deliberately, and we don't sacrifice product quality for growth metrics.
We make one firm commitment across all our products: the features that matter most are never paywalled. The ability to scan for a skimmer, declare a Mayday, or receive an evacuation alert works for every user at every tier. We believe the person who can't afford a premium subscription still deserves to be warned.
What we're building
Muster is fireground personnel accountability for fire departments — PAR checks, Mayday declarations, evacuation orders, rehab, and exposure records, all offline-first over a peer-to-peer mesh, because the fireground rarely has internet. It's built for the volunteer chief running a call at 2 AM.
CareHub is one calm place for everything an aging parent's care asks of a family — documents, appointments, prescriptions, care contacts, and a shared checklist, so the sibling three states away knows exactly as much as the one who drove to the appointment. Learn more at care-hub.app.
SkimGuard, Inc.
SkimGuard was founded within Safe Signals LLC and has since been spun off into an independent company, SkimGuard, Inc. Safe Signals retains an investor and stakeholder relationship, but SkimGuard is its own company now, operating at skimguard.io.