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rsync

In the Twilio world, I can do something like this, via the command line and their API:

- activate new phone number

- send SMS from that number

- deactivate number

I have not ever done that particular workflow, but I could.

Who is the Twilio of payments/fintech wherein I could perform a workflow like this:

- generate new CC number in my name

- set transaction limit(s) and expiry 10 days from now

- (go use that CC in real life)

- deactivate the CC

or maybe:

- disable existing card

- reenable existing card

I know I could do this if I wrote the API myself and had a big, complicated, sticky relationship with a bank ... but does someone let me do things like this if I am just an end-user (like Twilio does) ?

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Privacy.com gets pretty close. They can generate burner cards or "per service" (such as a card just for your netflix account) that have spending limits per some period of time or in total. Their autofill plugin for firefox works pretty well. That's the extend of my usage of the service, it might do more but I'm not sure.

Personally, I use them for anything that doesn't accept paypal or similar payment systems. Hopefully that's helpful.

Is there anything like Privacy.com, but for Canadians? I really like the idea of being able to have per-service burner cards

Not an ideal solution but you may want to look at prepaid credit cards. In my case, I use USD prepaid cards via CIBC for SaaS subs. https://www.cibc.com/en/personal-banking/prepaid/cibc-smart-...

I also use privacy.com and it’s great. The only problem is that sometimes merchants don’t accept prepaid debit cards (that’s what privacy.com cards are under the hood).

So far I’ve had cards rejected by Patreon and AT&T.

I still recommend privacy.com though.

Also, DigitalOcean. I'd used a prepaid debit card with them in the past, but they don't accept them anymore.

DO has some decent tech support. I would try to contact them and see if they could accept the card.

Adding that prepaid debit card to your PayPal account, then paying DO with PayPal works seamlessly.

I'd use privacy.com but I really like the points my CC gets me...

That reminds me, paypal used to have a one time/subscription CC generator browser plugin way back in the day. It was great. I used it all the time and one day it just disappeared.

You can do this today with Stripe Issuing! https://stripe.com/issuing

I had to implement a corporate version of this; they had a backing account and credit line, so this was an integration that involved four parties: the vendor, the owner of the credit account, the bank backing the credit account, and the card distributor. It was a messy process, involving key exchange and SOAP requests - very much a back-channel API more than a public-facing one.

I think a more publicly-friendly API might be created if it's merely the same credit card company providing temporary virtual credit cards that are backed by your main credit line. VCCs like that are already in use, the question is merely one of how freely accessible they are through programmatic means.

Now that Stripe offers a corporate credit card, it's likely only a matter of time until they enable people to build their own credit card on top of Stripe. I assume they've built the API's internally already for themselves.

https://stripe.com/issuing. Just needs a virtual-only option.

Stripe Issuing supports virtual card issuance.

I'm not a customer, but I believe that Revolut offers something like this, though with some restrictions and I'm not sure if they extend this to USA - they have the concept of 'disposable virtual cards' https://www.revolut.com/help/getting-started/getting-a-card/... and an API for controlling stuff.

Sounds like something Privacy.com could do without much trouble, though I don't think they actually have a CLI (yet).

Interesting ... although they do not have a CLI, can you call functions with 'curl', like:

curl api.privacy.com CID:blahblah token:blahblah ... action-action-blah-blah ?

I don't actually use a Twilio CLI - I call functions with curl from my own scripts ...

I don't know this specific site, but it's fairly common to put basic (or less basic) measures against such curl-ing.

I don't think there's a public API.

There seems to be some sort of API, some of which is non-free.

https://developer.privacy.com/docs#introduction

EDIT: It appears I was able to activate the API with my personal account.

Neteller has both physical and VCCs available for generation via their web portal. You can set a balance for each VCC, but I do not think they automatically expire. They do not offer an API to do it, but it should be possible to curl each endpoint leading to the generation.

I haven't used it, but https://developer.privacy.com could probably accomplish things like that.

Pretty sure you can do this via https://www.marqeta.com/api (disclaimer: I haven’t personally used; assume you need some $ to get an account).

How could you programmatically create a credit card without some pre-existing financial relationship with a a credit card issuer?

There's a good reason you cannot simply create and destroy payment cards without any trusted third party keeping track. Money laundering is the obvious issue.

Well, you'd presumable have some pre-existing financial relationship, all the legal agreements and stuff; it's just that instead of (or inaddition to) having a "long-term" credit card number you'd cycle through a bunch of disposable short-term credit card numbers. I.e. your relationship with the card issuer is long-term but the instrument you use to interact with merchants is intentionally limited to a short term.

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