Your Expired Visa Card Could Be ‘Zombified’ to Make Contactless Payments

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst demonstrated that fraudsters can “zombify” expired Visa cards by relaying their data through a man-in-the-middle app on two phones, enabling contactless payments at unattended POS terminals. Visa’s authentication flaw leaves the decision to block such transactions to individual banks, allowing some issuers to accept the fraudulent payments while others reject them. Consequently, discarded expired cards can be exploited to withdraw funds from the cardholder’s account unless physically destroyed.