who uses virtual/one-off credit card numbers?
 

I had some fraudulent transactions show up on my mastercard last week and went through the pain of cancelling the card, filing police reports etc to get reimbursed from the bank.

As the kind, rather sexy bank manager told me they offer a service for 8?/yr - a virtual card. Basically an app that sits on my desktop and when I need to give my cc details on a site, I use the number spewed out by that app, which is linked to my real card. Thus eliminating future fraud as the number is purely valid for that purchase amount only.

I'll certainly use this facility, but it's useless for things that I have tied to my mastercard like recurring billings and paypal, but for one-off payments looks great.

Anyone out there using stuff like that?

They've apparently been using this stuff for 3 years now, but it got me thinking - if you put the amount into the app and it gives a cc number valid for that single PoS, then it kills anything like x-sales and recurring billing....

Thats pretty cool an app will just generate you a new number
never heard of it - wish my bank would do it
id prob pay on a per transaction base instead of a flat low yearly fee like you mentioned

I heard of something like this years ago but I didn't think it ever caught on. I think this is the first time I've ever heard somebody actually bring it up in conversation, outside of news articles.

paypal offers that too as i know... probably for usa people

im in my paypal account now .. do you know where they got more info on this?

I don't mind ?8/yr at all for that, if it's as hassle free as they say it is

https://particuliers.societegenerale...rte_bleue.html

(in french)

I'd never heard about that, but my other bank (BNP) in france offers the same. It's a shame most world banks don't offer the same - I was quite liking the security offered for french transactions, which was when you made a payment in france, the bank would sms you a code after you had entered all your cc details and submitted, that you had to enter into the very final payment box to complete the transaction.

While that was a "hassle" it secured all my french transactions, and this e-card seems to be no more of a hassle than that.

In any case, if one of you fuckers ordered train tickets in Belgium with my card number, the police will be paying you a visit on the train :thumbsup

I used to have it on some card, it was free too, and it was actually pretty advanced, you could specify bunch of stuff, expiration date, max amount of transaction, number of transactions, etc... so you could set it to 19.99 for example and set expiration for next year and use it for your hosting...

who do you host with for $20/mo?!

so why did you give it up??? That's why I'm enquiring - any probs using it?

Paypal did have it listed under their shopping site at one time. You could generate a CC# for one off transactions, but I am not sure if that is still offered.

I had an online bank that did the same, but they were one of the first casulties when the economy tanked.

19.99 was just an example...

I didn't have any problems with it, but never really used it much, it was a slight pain to use, had to login to your credit card account, it didn't work right away, had to wait a minute or 2, the whole process took a few mins to setup... no major problems, but seemed pointless wasting few minutes dealing with it... it was really only useful when dealing with questionable vendors, which I don't really deal with much anyway...

Its free with us citi cards. I use it all the time.

I've been using Paypal's for everyone online purchase I make for years now.

Sometimes technology is too advanced for the majority and it just falls to the way side, shame really.

Yeah, it's been around for 2-3 years or so. Great for single point of sale transactions with unknown companies. very safe and secure, I think more and more banks will add this solution. So that's a potential killer to life time rebills.

Paypal offers or at least used to offer a Web browser search bar, in which you could generate new credit card numbers and load them with money from your account. But I also think it's only for US users and can not be used or accessed from any other country.

Actually, Paypal's plugin was disabled today as a matter of fact.

it's great service...