Expired credit cards revived by researchers to make unauthorized payments

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Researchers affiliated with the University of Massachusetts Amherst have found that you can get payments out of certain expired contactless credit cards, a process detailed at the recent USENIX Security 2026 conference. Credit cards, the authors explain in their paper, have expiration dates, but the way these dates get checked and enforced isn’t consistent. Thus, they were able to devise an attack that makes expired contactless cards appear to be valid to payment terminals.

Source: theregister.com