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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

You don't need a digital wallet app to do this, either. Plenty of credit card companies let you generate burner numbers to avoid giving out your real number.

EDIT: Would someone like to explain why this is downvoted? This statement is objectively true; for example, Capital One calls these "virtual card numbers".

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How do I key in a credit card number when I am at a target store checking out?

To continue to use the example of Capital One, you can use their virtual cards with digital wallets; the point is to demonstrate that this is neither a new capability nor something that is exclusive to digital wallet apps.

Because you can’t use those burner numbers to make brick and mortar purchases.

Your assertion was objectively false.

Cashiers in brick and mortar stores can enter card details manually. You've never had a card reader break and then had the cashier have to type it in by hand?

I have never convinced a cashier to use digits provided by me or off my phone screen. That is fundamentally different from getting them to manually enter a card.

But I understand you’re making irrelevant bad faith comments, because you’re too weak to admit that you were wrong about something unimportant.

kibwen, learn to take an L.

Sketchiness aside, the fee a merchant pays is different based on the capture method to incentivize using more secure methods. The bank, payment processor, and the merchant know how a PAN was processed.

Never once had that in my life.

It’s usually only done when the card reader isn’t working with the particular card. For example back in magstripe when it was the magnetized or if there’s a problem with the chip these days and magstripe fallback fails or the device doesn’t support stripe reading.

They can but they generally won’t. Use of the chip on the card shifts fraud liability from merchant to issuer. Burner card numbers are for card not present transactions.

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