A shirt I got from SportMart had one of these left on it:
Everyone knows this as an EAS or clothing security tag, inktag, or whatever. Luckily, mine didn’t have any ink.
First approach, look for the ball bearings
Caitlin found this site where a guy used a drill to remove the holding ball bearings. I imagine a hacksaw or a small torch/lighter would work just as well.
Such an approach didn’t work for me. Since the short side looked like the holding pin, I hacked away the long side enclosure and found no such spring or ball bearings. Instead, the thing was held together deep inside by a black-carbon metal piece with a raised section near the pin.
Removal is a cake
When I looked closer at the raised metal section I noticed that it had a slit perpendicular to the long direction that seemed to be holding onto the pin. All I needed to do was flex the long piece apart and the split would widen. After doing that you can slide out the pin on the other side. Cake.
If you cannot pull them far enough apart (very likely to happen if you haven’t taken the thing apart with a hacksaw already), then make a number of cuts in the pyramid section perpendicular to the long direction, this will create some joints that will allow you to more easily flex the tags.
I imagine the tool in the store pushes the indents on that side logitudinally away from each other by putting pressure toward the pin near to the raised section while pushing away from the pin further away from it. This would accomplish the same task with minimal work.
The rest of the long piece probably contains the copper antenna that sets off the detectors. What a simple piece of engineering, but really fucking annoying when you are caught on the other side of an idiot salesperson. I think I must have set off two other shoplift detectors that day. That place lost my business—no big loss, I’m sure.
