A past-time, turned passion of mine is listening to tech pod casts while taking daily walks with my dog, Duffy. I regularly listen to Security Now, with Steve Gibson and Leo LaPorte. (I listen to it, I only absorb about a third of it–very techie!) On episode #150, there was a discussion regarding the single-use PayPal credit card plug-in.

Seems Steve used the card for a purchase of one of those try-it-for-3o-days subscriptions-and-if-you-don’t-remember-to cancel-your-subscription,-we’ll charge-you-again! He thought the PayPal 1-time use card would be the way to go. However, he was surprised to find the 1-time use card was used again right before the expiration. Here’s an excerpt from the transcript of the show with the warning from Steve:

“….when I went to the Secure Cards tab under the PayPal Plug-in, it shows you all of your still live cards that you have, then the option of setting a checkbox to select them and manually close the card. So I wanted to inform our listeners that PayPal’s single-use cards are not single use. They stay alive for multiple uses until, presumably, the expiration date is passed. And so it is incumbent upon the user to manually shut down the card when they want it no longer to clear.”

PayPal – how can you do this? So for all of us who thought we truly had a “throw-away” card, not so fast! The ‘card’ generated by PayPal has an expiration of usually about a month. So in the future, take note of what the expiration is and after your purchase has cleared, log back in to PayPal and go to the Secure Cards tab as Steve indicated above and manually cancel or deactivate your card to protect yourself from unexpected and unauthorized charges.

I recently learned that PayPal is offering a valuable and FREE service for those of us who are wary of giving up our credit card information when making an on-line purchase. Now, you can use PayPal’s handy Secure Card plug-in–it’s a small download and install. After installation, you’ll see a PayPal icon in your browser tool bar. If you’re at a site and you’ve found a really great deal on something, but you’ve never shopped there before, use PayPal’s plug-in. It will generate for you a one-time credit card number to pay for the purchase. This way, your own credit card is never displayed and you are 100% protected by PayPal from an unauthorized purchase.

The nitty gritty:

• this plug-in can be used ONLY with sites that accept MasterCard
• there is a limit of $1,000 per day
• you pay for your purchase with your PayPal balance, if that balance is zero, the secondary source is usually your bank account. If I’m a first-time buyer at a website, I don’t mind giving up my frequent flier miles and a 30-day grace period before paying my credit card bill.

Some handy features:

• Auto-fill – the on-line forms can be filled out for you
• On-line history and receipts of your purchases
• Alerts from PayPal if you come upon a fraudulent website
• You can use a number multiple times at the same website

Below is a screenshot from the website that shows purchase history.

Generate new cards or view old cards

1 This notifier appears when you’re shopping.

2 Use the plug-in to see all the Secure Cards you’ve generated. You can:

• Generate new cards.
• Change expiration dates.
• Close cards.

There are several credit card companies that will issue you a single-use number – Citibank and Discover are two of them. Contact your credit card company to see if they might offer this service. It’s to their advantage to offer something like this. Neither the banks or we want to go through the hassle of cleaning up the mess of someone stealing our credit card numbers. You can read about it here.