Press Centre

Stealth-Mode Credit Cards

Jaclyne Badal
Wall Street Journal
September 16, 2007

Love to shop online but hate to trust Web merchants with your credit-card number? Bankers have a solution: virtual account numbers.

Think of a virtual account number as stealth mode for your credit card. It's a disposable number, usually good for one use or one merchant, that links to your credit card and works for Internet purchases.

The merchant never sees the real account number, which protects customers if the retailer's database gets hacked.

Bank of America, Discover Bank and Citigroup are among the companies offering the service, which varies by provider and typically doesn't involve any additional costs.

A desktop version of the Discover program, for example, pops up automatically when cardholders get to a Web site's checkout. Other programs require customers to launch the application or go to the bank's site.

Some numbers are single-use, while others are one-merchant numbers that can be reused. A reusable number can be helpful if shoppers plan to return to a site and want to keep an account on file.

Note that a virtual number isn't a smart idea if you need to show a credit card to pick up the purchase, like with movie tickets. That's because the number for the purchase and the number on the card won't match.

Federal law makes it fairly safe to use a credit card on the Web, since liability is limited to $50 for unauthorized credit-card use, and to zero if the charge involves a stolen number but not a lost card. The extra step is mostly for people who want to limit the personal information circulating on the Web or who want to avoid the hassle of reporting fraud in the first place.