Magician Locks Himself Out of His Own Hand After Forgetting RFID Chip Password

A British magician has found himself in an unexpectedly bizarre situation: he can no longer access the RFID chip implanted in his own hand because he forgot the password needed to reprogram it.

The performer, known professionally as Zi Teng Wang or “Zi the Mentalist,” implanted the chip as part of a high-tech magic routine. The idea was that audience members could tap their phones against his hand, triggering a link stored on the chip.

But the trick never worked as smoothly as hoped. According to Zi, the effect fell flat because spectators had to awkwardly press their phones around his palm to find the reader — “not mysterious or magical in the slightest.”

After several failed attempts to craft a compelling act, he decided to reprogram the chip to direct people to an online meme instead. That became his go-to gag, until the image hosting service (Imgur) hosting the meme went down following UK age-verification issues. Suddenly, the link on the chip pointed to nothing.

When Zi attempted to update the implant again, he discovered a new problem: he had completely forgotten the password protecting the chip. Without it, the device can no longer be updated, reconfigured, or reset.

Friends with technical expertise told him there’s no easy fix. The chip’s security is so basic that it cannot be bypassed — brute-forcing the password could take days or weeks, and the only guaranteed solution is to have the implant physically removed.