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Comment by ErikGulliksen | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly the reason I only use paypal or virtual cards from Revolut when I sign up to stuff online now. I can cancel the subscription from Paypal settings, or delete the virtual card in Revolut, and that ends up cancelling the service at expiry after they fail once or twice to take payment.

At least here in the UK this works fine. Netflix, Spotify etc all deal with that properly when I've "cancelled" my service this way.

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I do the same thing using Privacy.com. Enough companies today use the "fuck you" approach towards their users, hence the users should use the "fuck you" approach right back at them.

What's funny is how people won't use virtual cards because they think bill collectors or the law will come after them. That's extremely unlikely to happen for an unpaid $9.99 bill, especially since it's not like bill collectors work on behalf of companies free of charge. It's in the best interest of companies to ignore the transgression, freeze the account, and wait for the user to come back and reactivate it; much less likely to happen if they actively punish a user because they missed a payment.

Same goes for the "but muh credit score" argument. Somehow my credit score is still excellent despite the numerous times I cancelled virtual cards or didn't feel like paying my utility bills.

So yeah, use virtual cards everywhere.

Privacy.com allows you to use completely made up billing information - transactions won't get rejected if the name/address is a mismatch. You can just feed a fake name and address into each site, even if they wanted to, how would they identify you? Of course, this likely works best if you use an email aliasing service that hides your real email completely, and a VPN to obscure your physical IP address.

I can’t use Privacy.com because they use cellphone numbers. Supposedly, someone had used my number previously to sign up and now I cannot make an account since that number is “tied to an account”. It’s why I hate this standard of 2FA/“identity verification” with something as antiquated as phone numbers. I’d love to use their service, but as of right now I’m simply not allowed.

An admirable tactic, but a lot of services can spot those virtual cards because they "identify" as if they are pre-paid (and maybe they are in the backend, I dunno). Same trick as using Google Voice number for SMS/phone: it identifies as VoIP and more than a few sites give me the "hey, what are you trying to pull giving us a number we can't spam endlessly?!"

When I see those tactics I imagine the company throwing a full screen seizure inducing modal window with a red background and lime text of all their 1 star reviews and search for a new product.

I long for a day when customers get to exclusively vote with their wallet/eyeballs and we're not held hostage by the network effect and/or similar gatekeeping tactics

Virtual cards are the way to go. My bank offers free virtual cards for my accounts and they work flawlessly.

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