Virtual Credit Cards: A relatively secure and hassle-free way of making digital transactions

Are you one of the rare ones who wants to pay for the music, apps and movies that you enjoy? If yes, then it’s great to hear that you’re willing to support the creators of the content you love so much. But what happens when you want to support them, but can’t?

As more and more digital services gradually come to India, companies and content aggregators are now giving you the choice to use the services by officially paying for them.

The situation was a far cry four-five years back when users who wanted to play and not pirate content or apps had virtually no option to buy or enroll in various subscription-based services.

Now that most of the popular services are here and you have the choice, how many time have you noticed that you wanted to buy some app or game from the Google Play Store or iOS App Store but found that your credit or debit card was not supported? It happened often, right? The situation is worse if you use a service that isn’t available in India.

Well, you are not alone in facing this problem and this has plagued a lot of users over the years in India. The internal payment protocols to authenticate are slightly different for Indian and International banks which make many cards incompatible with the back-ends that some companies are using.

Keep in mind that your Debit or Credit card still works on MasterCard or Visa payment networks depending on the issuing bank, but that does not guarantee compatibility. In my personal observation, most of the problems occur with debit cards in comparison to credit cards.

If your credit or debit card does not come with EMV-chip, then it is unlikely that your card will work as RBI has gradually phased out the cards without EMV-chips. Cards without EMV-chips will still work for transactions in the country but they would fail while completing international transactions. Some banks require you to request for separate cards for International transactions.

But having an EMV chip-based card that has International transactions enabled does not guarantee that the card will work on all websites and all platforms. What a bummer, right? Well here is where ‘Virtual Credit Cards’ (VCC) step in the picture.

VCC are a comparatively safe means for transacting money as VCC-providers give you ‘virtual’ and disposable credit cards with limited validity. The best part here is that you can load or recharge the cards with whatever amount of money that you want. Most services don’t have a lower limit but do tend to have an upper limit on every account because otherwise, it turn into a money laundering system.

Indian banks like ICICI, HDFC, SBI, Kotak Mahindra, Axis, Union Bank, among other do provide virtual credit cards, but those cards come with some of the same problems as the normal physical cards. There are a number of companies that provide Virtual Credit Card services like Payoneer , EntroPay , NETELLER , Worldcore , NetSpend , and others, but my personal recommendation would be the  EntroPay Virtual Visa Card.

An EntroPay account has a minimum limit of $5 on a recharge with about 4.95 percent of the amount as a transaction fee along with a detailed breakup given on their website. It accepts most cards across the world and most international cards or cards with EMV chips are supported. The card is instantly activated once you sign in. So, in theory, you can get a new virtual credit card in 5 minutes.

The service maintains a detailed card statement along with received payments. The USP of the service is that apart from the transaction fees while recharging, the entire service is free and secure. The fact that the Virtual Visa Cards are prepaid, just like your SIM balance, makes them more secure, as even if hackers manage to hack the card details won’t actually have access to much.

EntroPay Virtual Visa Card comes with three levels of accounts, the first one is ‘Starter’ followed by ‘Basic’ and ‘Premier’. The ‘Starter’ account comes with a limitation of one virtual card and recharges up o $300. The Basic account allows you to create multiple virtual cards (up to 10 cards) with a recharge limit of up to $3,000 per year and a withdrawal limit of up to $800 per year. A Premier account upgrades the recharge limit to $20,000 per month along with withdrawal limit of $60,000 per month.

You need to verify your email ID and the residential address to upgrade from a ‘Starter’ account to a ‘Basic’ one, and you need to verify using your passport or government-issued documents or a driving license to verify your identity to upgrade from ‘Basic’ to ‘Premier’.

I have used the EntroPay Virtual credit card for my accounts spread across Adobe, Facebook, Google Play Store, DeivantArt, Wordpress, Netflix, Amazon Prime, 500px and Flickr with no problems so far. The only problem that I faced was while using Apple Music, which I didn’t have much time to troubleshoot as I don’t own any iOS devices.

This might seem like a blind promotion of EntroPay, but I can assure you, it’s not. I’ve tried multiple VCC services and this is the only one I’ve found that works across multiple international merchants with ease. If you’ve find another one that works just as well, by all means, do let me know in the comments section below.