While the advent of information technology in conjunction with credit cards has made the life very convenient as any thing can be obtained at the click of a mouse, it has also increased the susceptibility towards frauds as well. The fraudsters after taking the cards and the PIN numbers do online transactions and lead to a situation of despair for many of us. There was an apprehension that with the intensity of online frauds increasing the luxury of conducting all the business related and personal transactions from the comfort of home may become a thing of the past. But it has not happened like that. After all, the creator is one step ahead than the destroyer. The lucrative business proposition that the credit card companies have created for themselves could not be allowed to die a slow death. So, the panacea was found in the virtual world itself, and the genie unplugged out of the bottle was Virtual Credit Cards. What is a virtual credit card?

A virtual credit card is a card that exists in a virtual world. It does not have any physical shape or size. The validity of the card is also transaction limited. The card has come into vogue so that the transactions can be done in the cyber world without using the physical card. This is to instill confidence in the user about the security of the transaction. Whenever a transaction is to be done through the credit card, and if it has an option to generate virtual credit card, it would give you an option of generating the same on screen, before the transaction is to be completed. This is done through a note or a dialogue box that would pop-up on the screen and would ask you whether you want to use the virtual credit card to complete the transaction. Virtual credit card therefore can also be termed as a pre-paid card in the virtual world.

As the virtual credit card is a pre-paid card with a fixed denomination value, it can only be used for a specific transaction and after that the card is destroyed from the records. For every new transaction that is to be done, a new virtual credit card is generated so the cheaters and fraudsters cannot con you even though they might have copied the number of the card stealthily, as it is self-destructing. When you use the virtual credit card, it provides protection about your financial information. The biggest advantage of virtual credit cards is that it comes with zero liability against any unauthorized purchases made from your account. Another advantage of virtual credit card is that as it generates a new number every time, there is no chance of number being misused at all. Besides, the virtual credit card is free of cost and no maintenance or membership charge is made on this card. If you are using it, there is no download or user charge as well for using the virtual credit card. You can be assured that the transaction done by you is safe as a dialogue box appears on the screen which announces that the information being passed on to the web is encrypted by a state of art encryption method.