Discover Card and Citicard are two that I know offer it. Basically, when you need to make an on-line or mail-order purchase (or any purchase where you won't need to physically present the card), you start their free Internet tool and login and they will give you a fresh credit card number, expiration date, and the 3 digit number on the back of the card. (Discover's tool will even fill in shipping and billing address form information for you. ) That information is used to make the purchase but it links the purchase directly to your regular credit card account. Thus the vendor is given a virtual number that, depending on the CC company, may only be good for a single use or may only be good for that vendor and will expire in a few months and your real CC info never gets sent over the 'net. I love it and use it for all Internet CC transactions as well as most telephone CC transactions. My PayPal purchases are even charged to a virtual CC number so if anyone else tries to use that number, it flags the transaction as fraud.

 

Thanks for the info 12valve@heart!!!