The Private Virtual Card Company

Every Halocard starts as a virtual card: a full Visa number, expiry and CVC, issued in seconds and ready to use online straight away.

They are reloadable and run on a credit BIN rather than a prepaid one, which is why they are accepted at merchants that routinely decline prepaid cards.

A disposable card works like any virtual card until its first successful charge, then cancels itself. The number is spent. It cannot be billed twice.

Use one for a trial you don't intend to keep, or for any merchant you'd rather not leave a live number with.

A real Visa card for spending in person, drawing on the same shared balance as your virtual cards.

It answers to the same controls. Lock it, limit it or cancel it from the dashboard like any other card.

The ceiling is $1M a day. Below that your limit is simply your balance: deposit more, spend more.

Prepaid cards typically cap you somewhere around $10,000 a month regardless of what you have loaded.

You fund the account, not the card. Every Halocard draws on one balance, so there is no moving money between cards to cover a charge.

A new card costs nothing to create and needs no top-up of its own.

Halocards are held in US Dollars. Pay in another currency and Visa converts at its rate on the day, with Halocard's conversion fee on top.

Being USD-denominated is part of why a Halocard behaves like a US card at checkout, which matters at merchants that restrict signups by card country.

Give a card a daily, weekly or monthly limit and it declines anything above it.

A $20 monthly cap on the card you use for one subscription means a surprise price rise gets declined rather than charged. Limits apply per card and are editable at any time.

Both act immediately from the dashboard. Locking is reversible. The card authorises nothing until you unlock it, and then the same number carries on working. Cancelling retires the number for good, whatever the merchant has stored.

Lock the card you have misplaced or the subscription you are deciding about; cancel when you are done with a merchant entirely. Cancelling never strands money you are owed: refunds are credited to your account balance, not to the card, so they reach you either way.

Disposable cards cancel themselves the moment one transaction is successfully charged. No reminder to come back and switch it off.

It is the strongest defence against a merchant that quietly re-bills: the number simply is not there the second time.

Add a Halocard to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet and tap to pay in person, including at ATMs that accept phone wallets.

Both wallets work in the other direction too, as ways to top up your balance.

When a merchant asks for 3D Secure verification, Halocard issues a one-time code, so the extra step at checkout completes rather than dead-ends.

Refunds are credited back to your Halocard account balance and can take up to 14 business days to arrive. A wrong, fraudulent or contested charge can be disputed with Visa directly. The first dispute in any 12 months is free.

Halocards decline at adult, gambling, cryptocurrency and other merchant categories classed as high-risk. That is deliberate, not a gap.

Those categories attract the chargebacks that get an issuer's card ranges restricted, so blocking them is part of what keeps acceptance high everywhere else.