Hi all,

I was wondering if any of you know if any of the Swiss banks offer the service of creating a "virtual credit card" for internet shopping..I have this service for free with my bank back home and I found it extremely useful to buy airplane / train tickets, purchase stuff on Amazon, and so forth..

Thanks in advance!

I have a pre-paid credit card with UBS, I transfer money to it and then I use as a normal debit card, not sure if this is what you are referring to.

Thanks for such a quick answer! This is not exactly what I meant..the virtual credit card system allows you to create a different "virtual" credit card number associated with your account, each time with a different expiration date and CVV..

Anyhow, what you suggested could work as well, but before opening a new account I wanted to know if there was any bank offering such a system.

I had a casual look for this a few months ago and didn't find any.

I just checked all Swiss-based issuers (cardcenter, corner, swisscard, viseca) and, no, there is no such thing as a *virtual* card around here in Switzerland.

Out of curiosity, why is that you "found it extremely useful"? As far as I can see (and depending on the specific card product), the only reason to use it would be to limit your (perceived) exposure to fraudulent repeated use of the card?

I expect most banks here do not offer them after many banks elsewhere tried them and found them no more secure and a biggger fraud risk then normal credit cards which go through a proper credit cheque to be created.

What you described of the need to generate a new card number, cvv and expiry date is effectively a card generation process and they are just as riskyas normal cards to allowing overlimit transactions and transactions after expiry date of being allowed. Also many banks globally found they were a risk to allow generation of a new card number.

For these reasons I cant see a swiss bank offerring now or in the future as these cards are only really marketing gimics not more secure since they only provide a perceived security not a real one

They're one off, as I understand it, so they are promoted as being safer, because even if an online retailer holds your card details and they then get hacked, the details stolen are no use to the hackers (because they have already expired).

Cornér has a pre-pay credit card which is the closest I've heard of to a create-you-own number for transactions.

*****

Citibank (back in the US) has a feature that lets you do that.
I use it sometimes when I purchase stuff online from a retailer that I may not be familiar with and trust. The idea is exactly what you say, meaning you can set it to be a one-off use and therefore the merchant may not be able to charge you again in the future.
My point is... since this type of situations (i.e. purchasing stuff online from someone you don't trust) is not very frequent, why don't you use the service you already have from your bank back home?
You may incur some small additional transaction fee, but no big deal...

Use PayPal instead? No need to hand over your card details that way.

Yes, but not everywhere takes it. With VCC you have a one time use "card" with better acceptance.

I have one of these with Citi back in the US, but haven't seen it here. If you're worried about fraud, however, I can tell you that my credit card details were stolen once (not the actual card) and used (to buy airline tickets, of all things) and it was taken care immediately by UBS. No fees, no arguing. They simply cancelled the card, sent a new one, and sent a form that listed the fraudulent charges that I had to sign and return.