Re: Alternatives to PayPal for money transfers to
Below is something I use. It's a snippet from an email I sent to a friend. It relates to a payment I needed to send to a foreign country. My concerns were the same as yours. Sorry about the formatting - it was a cut-n-paste from an email:
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A solution came from the bank that issued one of my
credit cards ... MBNA. Anyway, they have something
called "Shop Safe". Basically, you never give out your real credit
card number. You go to their website and preauthorize a merchant,
an amount, a timeframe, etc. Then they issue a temporary, single
use pseudo credit card number that you give to the merchant. After
this pseudo number is used, it vanishes and is no longer available.
This is all done instantaneously via the website. Create as many temp
credit card numbers as you want. 24x7. No cost to you. I further
solidified this scenerio by ordering an additional credit card from
MBNA. This one with a low $500 credit limit that they will never
increase without my specific request. Anything over that $500 limit
is simply denied by MBNA. No penalties or fees to my account. It
is from this second credit card that I will use the Shop Safe service.
I never give out that "real" $500 limit credit card number - only the Shop Safe
numbers created against it.
Certain cards MBNA issues do NOT quality for Shop Safe. Namely, "points earning"
cards for a specific merchant (e.g., an "LL Bean Mastercard"), so if you apply for
a new card, be sure to tell them you want one that you can use with Shop Safe.
Their "generic" cards work just fine.
www.mbna.com
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Since I wrote the above, I have used the service a few times. I was incorrect when I said you specify a merchant. You do not specify that (because often times you don't know the specific merchant name). What happens is that the FIRST merchant to charge against your Shop Safe number becomes the ONLY person who can do so. Also, you can change the amount on the Shop Safe card after you initially create it. Say you authorize a $30 card. The merchant charges $20. If you leave things alone, they can come back again and charge the remaining $10 (same merchant), as long as they're within the timeframe you specified (you end up setting your own expiration date for the card, in effect). Or you can simply close the card after it's initial use. You can also increase amounts on a card as well. So if you want to deal with the same merchant again, you don't need to create a new Shop Safe card (although you certainly could if you'd prefer).
