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Virtual card

Web På svenska → Updated: 2026-10-30

A card number with no plastic behind it, often minted for a single purchase or a single merchant so that a leak has limited blast radius.

Technically it is an ordinary card number with an expiry date and CVV, issued on the same BIN as everything else. What differs are the rules attached. The number can be locked to one merchant, one amount or one use, and killed with a tap. A single-use number that turns up in a breached database is already spent, and one locked to a streaming service is useless anywhere else. It also makes forgotten subscriptions easy to cancel. Revolut and similar banks offer them to consumers.

The big market is corporate, though. Travel agencies pay hotels with a fresh number per booking, and issuer processors such as Marqeta generate them through an API. Unlike a network token, a virtual card is a real card number that works anywhere cards are accepted, with no cryptographic binding to a device.

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