Some websites or services let you sign up only if you enter a valid credit card. This can happen even if you have no intention of ever buying something from the service or website. Sometimes you may prefer not to enter your own credit card information on the Internet, and sometimes you do not have a valid credit card that is accepted in another country.
What other options do you have? You could try and get a virtual credit card, either from a bank that is offering those cards or an online service such as Entropay. The first may work fine and without lots of administration, the second can be quite the hassle to setup and maintain. Plus, it can happen that virtual credit cards won’t be accepted by the service or website, in which case you are still not able to complete the sign up process.
An alternative to this are test credit card account numbers. They are not linked to any accounts or names. PayPal has a public page with test credit card account numbers available where you find credit card numbers for major companies such as American Express, Mastercard, Visa or Discover.
The expiration date can be freely selected, the only requirement is that it needs to be a data in the future in mmyy format.
The credit cards cannot be used to make purchases. What they can be used for however are services that require you to enter a credit card either during signup or for specific services they offer. One example would be Amazon’s AppStore service which requires you to enter a valid credit card account number to download the free apps that it provides on a daily basis.
It is likely that at least some sites and companies have banned those credit card numbers from being used on their sites. You’ll probably be surprised that they will work on a lot of sites on the other hand.
Disclaimer: Please note that companies or organizations may see it as fraud if you are using credit card information that are not your own. Neither ghacks nor the author of this article are responsible if this happens.
© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: credit card, credit cards, paypal, virtual credit card
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