I understand that this isn't the purview of yellow journalism, but to be accurate, the statement should be: "I can now kill your grandmother just by walking past her on the street, and asking her to stand still while I hold an induction wand quite close to her pacemaker"
No, original commenter is correct. You'd need contact with your victim, you have to hold a reader device directly over the pacemaker. Really you may as well stab them.
I'd like to know how hard (or easy) it would be to fool a PM into causing and unsafe fast heartbeat. I would imagine there are safeguards at a low level against such a fault. The easiest thing for a PM hacker to do, assuming they have close physical contact with the victim, would be to shut off the pacemaker and in most cases that would not do much more than cause dizziness or fainting.
