The use of virtual payment cards in public transport is becoming increasingly popular, such as Apple Pay in combination with OVPay. Nevertheless, public transport services have decided to block some virtual cards when checking in and out, because fraud was committed with it.
It is specifically about the abuse of one -off virtual credit cards from Revolut, Paysafe and Vivid. These cards can be immediately blocked or thrown away after use, so that public transport transactions made could not be written off. Physical payment cards from Revolut still work.
What exactly is going on?
A number of users committed fraud by deliberately blocking their one -off virtual payment card after they had traveled with that card. As a result, the travel costs were not debited, which led to financial loss for transport companies.
This abuse undermined confidence in the payment system, because not the card publisher caused the problem, but the way in which users acted. In response to this, various public transport carriers have blocked these temporary virtual maps for use at gates and card readers, to prevent further damage and loss of income. Physical payment cards from Revolut and other banks still work.
One -off virtual credit card
A one-off virtual credit card from, for example, Revolut is a digital card that you can create directly via the Revolut app and use only once. After the first payment, the card number is automatically replaced, so that the original card cannot be reused. This ensures maximum safety when purchasing online, because your card data will no longer be usable for others after use.
Blocking virtual cards
The temporary blocking of virtual cards for some online banks has been taken to protect the public transport sector against further abuse, this has nothing to do with the reliability of the payment systems of Revolut or Ovpay, among others.
Because public transport services do not write off the travelans action until night, you as a user had the time to remove the virtual card after your journey, so that OvPay could not write off anything. You can continue to use physical payment cards. The public transport sector could solve this problem by immediately claiming the travel costs after checking out.