I use virtual cards for lots of online transactions and subscriptions/memberships. More and more places are now not accepting the use of virtual cards. They are able to detect that a virtual card is being used by the first six digits of the credit card number that is generated. Is there anyway around this? A way to hide the fact that I’m using a virtual card?? I’ve tried using a VPN, TOR, and a variety of virtual card numbers. But it seems like it comes down to those first six card numbers.
All you can really do it contact the company (I’m guessing privacy.com?) about it so they can try and fix it.
It’s actually through my bank. They allow me to create as many virtual cards I want for online transactions. But as I stated, becoming harder and harder to use. From what I understand though, it’s pretty much industry wide with virtual cards that they have a distinctive BIN number , which is the first six digits of the card. So it’s not really anything that privacy or my bank can fix. It’s just the way virtual cards work. I appreciate the reply and suggestion, though!
1 Like
Yea, it’s just unfortunately how it is. You could try using a visa vanilla card, but there are sites that block those too.
A virtual card number shouldn’t be affecting your purchases. The first six digits of a credit/debit card are the BIN (Bank Identification Number) which is really just an identifier of the bank or institution that issued your card. Your physical and virtual cards from the same bank will all share the same BIN (first six digits).
Also, if you’ve ever used Apple or Google Pay, they essentially create and send a unique number (token) to a merchant every time you pay, so they never receive or store your original PAN (Primary Account Number) or 16 digit card number.
Virtual cards are used ubiquitously these days, so there must be something else contributing to those declines… Perhaps a combination of your country location vs country your card was issued vs country of the merchant you’re making a purchase from?
I am curious. Are the virtual credit cards (VCC) that you’re using provided by a fintech company (Privacy.com) that essentially does only that, or are they provided by the bank?
Although this is complete speculation, I would not be surprised if the VCCs provided by fintech companies are more detectable than the ones provided by banks, especially legacy banks that have been established for many decades.
That being said, I know that Notesnook stopped supporting Privacy.com’s cards for some reason. I don’t know if they work again now. I don’t use Privacy.com, but the VCC that I used for Notesnook, which is provided by a bank, stopped working on my 2nd or 3rd year of being a paid subscriber.
When I tried re-creating a new card, it didn’t work either, and I don’t know why. As a result, I had to switch to PayPal, and you know what’s really messed up? The credit card that is linked to my PayPal account is a VCC from the same provider, and yet the payment went through. So this doesn’t make sense to me.
It is possible that your payments are being blocked by the payment processing company. Notesnook uses Paddle. Most of the services I use use Stripe. You should investigate if that is the issue. When I contacted Paddle, they never responded back.