Online card fraud is running rampant across Europe right now, increasing by nearly 10% in 2016 to €1.8 billion, with France and the UK at the top of the list.
In the last two years, Revolut has been at the forefront of tackling card fraud, from allowing customers to freeze / unfreeze their cards to disabling features like contactless or swipe payments and even ATM withdrawls.
”So, to enhance our efforts in this area and improve the diversity of our Premium accounts, we’ve launched Disposable Virtual Cards so that you can make safe and secure online payments.”, says the company.
How do they work?
Each time you make an online payment with a Disposable Virtual Card, our systems will instantly detect the transaction and then automatically destroy those card details, generating new ones that will appear directly in the app.
This will add an extra layer of security and protect customers against online card fraud, especially if you are making multiple online payments on a regular basis.
Why do I need such a card?
Although many people believe ATM card cloning is the most common type of card fraud, data shows the majority of these cases take place online in a type of transaction known as Card Not Present or CNP.
Card Not Present transactions occur when the buyer and seller are not in the same location and the majority of CNPs consist of online payments.
Fraudsters can take advantage of this type of transaction by positioning themselves between you and the merchant while you’re using your card online, in order to ‘phish’ (to copy) your card details.
Once your details have been collected, the hacker can then ‘clone’ them onto a physical card or simply use them to pay for purchases without you even realising.
Are there limits with disposable cards?
To provide even more value to our Premium customers, Disposable Virtual Cards are currently offered as part of the Revolut Premium account. Each Premium user is allowed to create 1 Disposable Card per account.
For fraud prevention purposes, a Disposable Virtual Card will work for up to five payments per day.
Disposable Virtual Cards will not work with subscription services or any other type of recurring payment, since the card details will renew after every payment.
Vlad Yatsenko, co-founder and CTO at Revolut says: “While fintechs generally offer a better service than traditional banks, they still have a long way to go in order to build trust and confidence with consumers. Instead of matching what the larger institutions are doing, we are changing the game entirely by introducing disposable virtual cards and promoting existing features such as location-based security and the ability to freeze/unfreeze cards.”
“It will take approximately 800 years before we begin to run out of 16-digit card numbers, so we view disposable virtual cards as a sustainable, long-term solution to tackling online card fraud.”
Source: Revolut
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„So many people are coming here to Bucharest, people that I see and interact on linkedin and now I get the change to meet them in person. It was like being to the Football World Cup but this was the World Cup on linkedin in payments and open banking.”
Many more interesting quotes in the video below:
