InventorSpot

Cheating significant others, shady businessmen, and teenagers the world over are getting nervous. A new gadget developed by New York-based BrickHouse Security can recover deleted text messages from the SIM card of a cell phone. The security firm has been overwhelmed by orders from companies located in the United States and Australia. The device is priced at $180. The company reports a sales growth of 1500 percent with the introduction of their new SIM card spy.

The device is simple to operate really. Take the SIM card out of the phone in question, plug it into the device, and plug the device into your computer. You will be able to download any data to your hard drive - including text messages that the cell phone owner has tried to delete.

The premise behind the SIM card spy is similar to that of a typical computer hard drive. Once you delete the text message, the cell phone marks it as deleted, but the message actually still resides on your phone, until a new text message overwrites it. The SIM card spy is then able to find these "missing" text messages and reconstruct their data to present them as whole messages again - as long as the message in question has not yet been overwritten by new data.

The company reports they've had three types of interested parties: "...spouses, parents and people who deleted an important text of their own." The company reports that the device went on sale earlier this year.

Via Courier Mail