Have you tried them for privacy purposes? What are your experiences?
Here is mine. I’ve used the Visa prepaid cards. Where I live (USA) you can buy them “anonymously”. Scare quotes because sure, nothing is 100% anonymous now. But you can buy them with cash and activate them without giving a phone #. Not quite as anonymous as cash, but close. It avoids the heavy data trail of a normal CC. And you can use them sometimes where you can’t use cash.
But there’s the prob. It’s hit and miss if they work. Unfortunately, these are HUGE among scammers, so those scammer fucks poisoned the well. Some stores will flat out deny them. Other times, they work fine.
I’ve had probs at some point of sale terminals, others work OK. Ditto gas pumps. Seems to be no way to know which way it’ll go without trying. Which means you gotta have another way to pay lined up.
I haven’t tried them for online shopping yet.
They mostly work from what I’ve used, but since websites are able to tell them apart from regular credit cards it’s up to them to decide. YMMV but most subscriptions won’t allow a prepaid card to be used as payment, but for one-off purchases they typically work fine
It is getting worse though. I’m getting more and more “payment processor declined card” errors while using them even on sites that used to accept them. I think in the past they’ve been kinda obscure but now they’re rising in popularity as people try to protect their privacy. And so more sites are cracking down on them
It’s kind of like VoIP numbers. They used to work for SMS verification everywhere but now it’s pretty rare to find any website that won’t detect and block them
Thank you for relating your experience. That’s similar to what I’m seeing in meatspace use.
It sucks that every privacy tool we have gets abused for scams and fraud, which causes clamp-downs. It makes me seethe at those who abuse the tools. It doesn’t just hurt their victims. Hurts everybody who wanted those tools for legit honest privacy reasons.