Beware Of Zombie Credit Cards That Work After Expiration
Researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst have uncovered a critical security flaw in contactless payment processing that allows expired credit cards to be reanimated and used for fraudulent purchases.
Presented at the USENIX Security 2026 conference, the UMass researchers demonstrated how "zombie credit cards," or cards that have expired, can be used to complete point-of-sale (POS) transactions. Led by doctoral candidate Raja Hasnain Anwar and Assistant Professor Taqi Raza, the team managed to spoof store card readers into approving payments from cards that were no longer valid, even after replacement cards had already been issued to the original account holders.
Because financial institutions allow active credit card accounts to accept incoming refunds on expired cards, the team wondered whether the flow of funds could be reversed. Their investigation showed that the expiration date stored on a card's chip is used by POS terminals to verify validity, but that metadata...
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