Hacker News Reader

Comment by texasbigdata | Hacker News Reader

Is there a way as a consumer to get unique credit card virtual IDs? Even with a fee. I’d love to separate “let me just try this once” payments and if I forget about the random thing because it’s not useful to have the card vanish after a month (cough golds gym).

View on HN

Well that's what privacy.com (where this blog post is written) does, unless you checked it out and it's not what you want? I use them daily.

(Googler, I work on payments. opinions are my own)

Google Pay and Apple Pay sort of already do this. When you use tap&pay from your device, you're paying with a DPAN (device/digital primary account number), which was generated when you add the card to your phone (the number on your card itself is the FPAN (f = funding)). You can see the last-4 for this card within the App or when you pay at a store the the receipt shows you your last-4 of your card (it'll be different than your normal card.

I feel like the networks don't want new PANs per transaction, so you can get new ones, but the address space may not be large enough to high card # turnover.

What's the point of unique number? Just push everything through one card, like NAT.

When you do refunds, you want to make sure it’s going back to the same account via the same payment method. Otherwise, you’re opening yourself up to avenues of fraud.

Also helps merchants who offer refunds without receipts, as they can ensure the item was purchased from them at some point in the recent past.

I work in a bank where we tried to sell the idea to the finding committee. They didn't think it was worth it.

Visa has support for the feature on the backend (they'll give you all the virtual cards you want) but you need a bank license to use it.

In my home country (Turkey), we have virtual cards that usually have zero limit, and you can assign a limit to them temporarily (like an hour) to make a purchase. Then the card returns to the state without any limit, so no merchant gets to charge more than once or above the assigned limit. If that virtual card is compromised, you can just get a new card and kill the old one.

That sounds dangerous. If you sign up for a gym and then your credit card stops working for whatever reason, it won't cancel your contractual obligations. You would still be legally liable to pay the fees for the duration of the contract. So I imagine you would have to deal with debt collectors and crappy credit for years to come.

How do I downvote?

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#downvo...

You don't have enough karma to downvote.

I'm not sure someone saying "cancelling a credit card doesn't cancel a contractual obligation," which is an objective fact, warrants a downvote either.

Sounds dangerous. It might mess up my ability to consume more stuff.

OP here....based on the comments, it probably does :)

Even though the article was a blatant ad for privacy.com in all fairness just a few more clicks would have answered it.

In my experience most vendors will just cancel/pause your account in the event of a failed transaction, unless it is for a very large amount (>$50) they wont bother sending it to collections because there are fees for them to do that.

In my opinion the best benefits of privacy.com is that you can provide a fake name and address during signup (they will authorize it with any name/zip/addr). Good luck sending stuff to collections without my real name or address.

Mercury.com also provides a similar virtual card service to business banking customers, but unfortunately they don't let you use fake names/addresses like Privacy.com does (probably for good legal reason).

Gyms will and have absolutely sent people to collections for $80-100 or less.

Luckily, this is exactly what privacy.com offers.

CapitalOne has it, you have to install their Eno browser extension to use it

capital one does provide such services with their Chrome extension

Reply on news.ycombinator.com