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WTF?! Credit cards aren't meant to last forever, but a team of researchers just found a way to keep expired ones alive for a little longer than intended, and not for the cardholder's benefit. Not every card is affected, but the flaw sits deep enough in how contactless payments are verified that exploitation isn't just theoretical.
Being unable to use a credit card to pay for your groceries is annoying enough. It's worse when a "zombie" card claws its way back to life and bites you in the bank account. According to researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, there's a way to abuse an already-expired card to make unauthorized purchases.
The UMass Amherst team first presented the work at the USENIX Security 2026 conference. In the paper, assistant professor Taqi Raza and his co-authors show that "dead" credit cards past their expiration date can still be pushed through vulnerable point-of-sale (POS) terminals to complete fraudulent purchases.
