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Comment by mdonahoe | Hacker News Reader

What's the latest in virtual credit card numbers? I've seen these services advertised, but I haven't tried one yet.

I'd love to be able to "cancel" a subscription service by just deleting my card and stopping automated payments.

It would be nice if I was then not legally obligated to pay any outstanding bills, but I doubt I would win that fight, so I question how good these cards are in practice.

Has anyone tried one?

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Privacy works, but you should be aware that without attempting to cancel on the service, some providers get really angry. I tried and failed to cancel NYT, and they force-posted [0] a subscription renewal despite getting declines on the card. In other words, it didn't matter that the card was paused or that they didn't get authorization, they still tried to post the transaction. I don't necessarily expect this from every service, but it certainly wasn't as painless as I thought it was going to be with a virtual card number.

[0]: https://support.privacy.com/hc/en-us/articles/360012288214-F...

Ah, great to know that the merchants have another tool to take whatever money they feel entitled to from my account based on nothing more than "but we really really want to!" My first introduction to credit cards, when I was a kid, was via some.. uh.. shared CC numbers online. I couldn't believe how insecure the whole system was. Were people just that naive back in the day?

I've used Capital One's virtual card service many times to close a card associated with a service that would've otherwise required me to chat or call someone to cancel. It's worked extremely well.

Most services will just give up trying to charge you and cancel your subscription after a few failed attempts, but I had a bad experience with BritBox a few years ago. I signed up for a trial with a Revolut card that barely had any balance and forgot to cancel, and then to my surprise when the trial ended a "delayed transaction" appeared in Revolut, and they overdrafted me. There was absolutely no mention of this when signing up for the trial, I only saw a $0 authorization charge.

Fnb, a South African bank, has these as part of their offering for free. I use them for all new paid services. They're easy to create, block and delete and just fantastic for this sort n of thing

https://www.fnb.co.za/promotions/PBVirtualCard/index.html

Isn't it easy to cancel with a normal credit card?

Privacy.com is fantastic

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