How to Use a Disposable Virtual Card

Today, I'm going to walk you through creating and using a disposable card from Halocard. Disposable cards are a unique product which allow only a single one-time purchase on your card. Great for merchants that look a bit shady, where you want to control how much they can actually charge to your credit card, and also great for signing up for trials where you only want a specific amount to be deducted from your card one time.

Today, we're going to purchase the data removal service called Incogni. I can see on the Incogni website that they do have an annual plan, but for me, I actually only want to sign up for a single month, and I don't want it to be recurring billing. So, I'm going to choose their unlimited plan for $29.98. And I'm going to set up a Halocard so that they cannot take more than $29.98 from my account.

Going over to my Halocard dashboard, all I need to do is click on Create a New Card, then choose the disposable type, one-time use. Here I can set a name. In this case, I'll just call it my Incogni trial card. And I'm going to set a spending budget of exactly $30. That card's going to be created and in a few seconds will be active and ready for use. And it will only accept a single one-time charge of less than or equal to $30.

I can see my card has now been created. It's tagged with the title Disposable. I can click on the card, it'll flip, and then it will reveal the card number, the expiry date, and also the CVV, which I'll now use to purchase Incogni.

The beautiful thing about Halocard is you can set whatever name or billing address you want, and control exactly what information you give to merchants when you're making online purchases. In this case today, my name is going to be John Doe, and I'm going to be a resident of New York with a postcode 10118. When using a disposable card from Halocard, you can enter whatever name and address you want, and those details will automatically be approved, so all your transactions will go through.

Now that I've entered my card details and my name and address, I'm going to go ahead and complete the purchase. The payment's been successful.

Going back to the Halocard dashboard, I can see that my Incogni trial card has now been charged with a single purchase of $29.98. If I click on that transaction, I can see all the details associated with that purchase. But most importantly, it hasn't exceeded my $30 budget. And now that we've had a single successful transaction go through on that card, the card will automatically cancel and self-destruct, so it can't be charged any further by Incogni or any other merchant.

If a disposable card would be helpful for your online purchases, you can sign up for Halocard below. They're available with any of our annual plans.