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Comment by legrande | Hacker News Reader

If you're in the EU, try getting the Revolut app. They have a feature called 'virtual cards' which are great for e-commerce purchases. The idea being, you use a card once and then terminate it after making a purchase. This means you don't get unexpected charges a year (or two) later as most services keep your card 'on file' now, which is a dark pattern.

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Careful. My friend used Revolut virtual cards and forgot to deactivate the card after the purchase. Months (or a year) later he got a fraudulent charge and Revolut refused to waive it because they claim he should have deactivated the virtual card. If it were on a regular credit card he may have just been able to dispute it.

You should use their one time payment cards to be safe

Payment processing gateways can see what type of card you're using and many one-time/prepaid cards will be rejected for recurring service or deposit related billing.

Many if not most merchants I deal with refuse those. Which is terribly annoying when it's a shop with clunky checkout flow.

I'm baffled by the fact that the system is designed in any way to enable merchants to know that the card you're paying with is a single use card.

They run two transactions, the first being £0 and it resets the card number causing the second to fail.

That sounds like a bug on Revolut's side. It's supposed to be one payment per number, right?

No, it’s strategic. Feature not a bug. As someone who has integrated with Visa/MC/Amex using old school SOAP APIs, you will get higher quality context about what’s going on with the card when you hit it with a zero dollar transaction. Can’t say for sure if they are doing it primarily to avoid supporting this virtual card thing. But I found it conventional in my fintech stint

Parent is saying Revolut should handle both the 0 payment and the subsequent real payment without resetting the number so that this workflow succeeds. They’re not saying to fix the double charge attempt, which as you say gives more information.

They're saying £0 isn't a payment and Revolut should ignore it. It's not a Revolut bug but it's missed functionality for sure.

I'm not sure, the merchant is running a dummy payment transaction presumably for this scenario so they can avoid people not giving them a card to charge at will.

This is where the card numbers that you can generate are best because you can delete the card afterwards.

This is simply not true. You're not talking about the same type of card. Tell me one website that doesn't allow Revolut one-time virtual cards (note that these are not prepaid cards)

I have Revolut and have encountered this a number of times.

The flow is usually that the merchant runs a check against the card by doing a £0 transaction rather than the correct card active check which resets the card number and causes the second transaction of the correct amount to fail.

Privacy.com for USA.

Using cancelled cards and filing chargebacks is a good way to get banned from that vendor. Maybe you don't ever want to do business with Amazon again and more power to you, but if you do you're better off arguing with their folk over "just" cancelling the card.

chargebacks may get you banned, but cancelled cards are fine. It's on the business to perform dunning requests and maintain short billing grace periods for automatic renewal charge retries before retracting services.

Revolut's method is to automatically cancel the virtual card after the user-initiated purchase goes through, not before, and not by issuing chargebacks. Obviously if you actually want to have a subscription autorenewed and stay uninterrupted, you shouldn't use the virtual cards there as you will be getting service interruptions every billing cycle and have to manually update your payment with a new vcard. Still, not likely to get you banned.

A different risk of using virtual cards is that the merchant might not be able to issue a refund after the bank destroys the card.

source: as primary billing engineer at our subscription B2C company — cancelled cards give us no problems that make us consider banning a customer. The closest is when we have a customer using such a feature bombarding our support about service interruptions because of his own cancellations, and trying to calmly explain that they did that themselves.

Chargebacks definitely do pose a problem though, as they increase the risk of us getting blacklisted as a fraudulent merchant, and also a more lengthy settlement process with the customer and bank, where we aren't even able to simply issue a refund and close the issue.

I understand that it works in practice since the vendor has no incentive to argue about it, but it's not really legal to simply not pay for a contract you've entered, right?

It's not, they can take you to court or take other measures against you if they care enough. At least in the EU (where this advice was aimed at).

As a warning, Revolut was recently compromised with some breach of user data.

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