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.
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Should You Get A Virtual Credit Card For Online Purchases?How To Verify Your PayPal Account Without A Credit Card
Visa, MasterCard Plan to link Credit Card Purchases And Online Marketing
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How Stolen Credit Cards are sold
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My guess is these numbers are approved by the credit card industry
for testing purposes and because of that these numbers will never
actually be assigned to anyone and there is no risk of using
someone else s credit card number by using one of them.
Thanks, Martin.
Bookmarked.
Some websites or services let you sign up only if you enter a valid credit card.
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That would be the porn sites, right? [lol]
@Jojo.. it’s not always that only adult sites require this but other websites also may require such information, such as Apple store where I had to give my Credit Card info to create an account. Though, I never made purchases from there. And we all know Apple store is very much anti porn. :).
Thanks Martin for this useful information.
Regards
A silent GHacks regular.
No, it’s not necessary to provide CC No. to create Apple Store account. I think another post on same by Martin will be good.
Thanks you sooo much. That will help me with file storage websites having a paid option. Not that I am going to use the fake credit card number for trying to purchase the paid account – but I will be using it for making a free testing account (just to download the file). Even for a free account they ask my credit card number – even when they won’t do a single transaction from it for 3 months (demo account period).
Thanks for that! When I’m asked for a credit card number under such circumstances, I just go away and don’t go back. Now I have another option to try.
Nice idea, but in England and presumably many other jurisdictions, the use of such “test” numbers without official permission would be considered fraud. Even if you were not making a purchase you are still using a credit card number that isn’t yours for personal gain (i.e. the ability to register for a freebie or whatever). I would strongly advise against using such numbers. They will be monitored. They will be able to request your personal details from your IP. You could get caught, fined, or worse.
Just curious, David Bradley. Which Bar or Barrister exam did you pass?
can’t even see the numbers they re blurry
i wanna sign up for a free account but it needs credit card number and as far as i have no credit card i need a fake number to register .its free and wont charge me money but inserting credit card numbers is compolsry thank you