[leros]

A virtual card is just as legitimate as a physical card. The numbers are just account ids basically. In my business, I setup virtual cards for many vendors.

Sounds like you're trying to detect fraud. There are fraud detection platforms particularly designed for checkout fraud. Instead of re-inventing the wheel with a theory you have, I would look into some of those solutions that are fairly robust taking into account many different factors and often data from across merchants.

[Trias11]

I agree. Working in a fraud space myself.

Typically the ones who cares about virtual vs. physical cards are the questionable vendors trying to push shady, automated, hard-to-cancel subscription services or alikes to customers.

Virtual cards are designed just for this purpose - to let consumers gain upper hand in shady business practices.

[leros]

Virtual cards are also nice for setting up rules and alerts. I can setup a virtual card for a single merchant, then tell it to alert or block charges over a certain threshold.