Use Virtual Credit Cards For Secure Online Shopping

It is fairly established that online shopping is relatively safe in its current form. That said, there are always situations where your information can be hijacked or stolen and, subsequently, used by thieves. To combat this, some credit card issuers are offering virtual credit cards.

A virtual credit card is very simple in concept. Your credit card issuer provides you with one-time use credit card information that ties to your account. When you make a purchase, you enter your virtual card number, your account is billed and the virtual card number become invalid. This way if someone were to steal the card information, it doesn’t matter because it is void anyway.

While not all card issuers support this, if you are concerned about making a particular purchase then this might be worth looking into.

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Rory Schmitz
Do you have any examples of any banks that support this? and would they be called 'Virtual Credit Cards' or dubbed something else?

http://twitter.com/faulkner132 Jason Faulkner
I have never personally used a virtual credit card, but from what I can tell they are offered by Citibank, Bank of American and Paypal. Of course this is not an exhaustive list so email your provider if you are unsure as to whether or not they offer them.
LuisR
Bank of America uses a service called ShopSafe which is nothing but virtual credit card numbers. You can define the maximum charge and its expiration date. You can also set them for recurring charges.
A word of caution. In some cases you need to show up the card you used for the purchase. I recently purchased tickets online for a concert and when I got to the venue to pick up the tickets they asked to have the card used for purchase but I could not because I used a virtual number different from the real account number printed in the card. They were able to find my tickets but took longer due to this.

Robrpb
Discover card allows you to generate secure online account numbers. I have used them. I thought that they were one time use numbers, but they are not. The number can be used over and over for the same vendor. It cannot be used for any purchases made from a different vendor. If you make purchases from Newegg, then that number is only valid with Newegg. With Discover you can call them up and ask them to delete that secure number so that it can't be used again after the purchase.