A cashless Olympics could turn nine million visitors into victims, according to an article from Computing.co.uk.

Opportunistic card fraudsters will be well-positioned to make the most of the two-week event by targeting unsuspecting spectators. 

According to Mike Urban, director of financial crime risk management solutions at financial services technology provider Fiserv, near-field communication (NFC) technology enables mobile phone payments to be made by simply holding a smartphone close to another wireless capable device, which also provides cybercriminals with an easy target. 

"NFC technology can be adapted to collect sensitive data from cards with just the swipe of a phone," he said in the article. "Furthermore, retailers with connected systems and networks also risk cyber attacks – once fraudsters have hacked into the network, they have access to every server, point-of-sale device and PC connected to it." 

But sophisticated technology isn't needed for this form of fraud. Criminals can trap a card in a machine, skim the magnetic stripe's information and record the PIN as it is entered, or just hack into the network. 

"The problem is, magnetic stripe technology is old," Urban says. "And many of the global travelers to the Games will arrive with magnetic stripe cards, not chips. The widespread use of common operating systems also compounds the problem; hackers and fraudsters know how to breach these systems." 

He recommends real-time fraud monitoring as a potential solution.