Originally Posted by
deskover54
how do they prevent that? if it's just a credit card number on a piece of paper, couldn't it be used for anything?
It is, in fact, just a credit card number on a piece of paper.
However, credit card issuers have the ability to select which type of merchants can charge to the cards. If you enter that number at Amazon, the issuer will decline it. (I remember an email, years back, about how they were limiting the merchant categories you could use with our corporate cards. Among the list of now-denied categories was... podiatrists. Which made me wonder who, exactly, had pulled out their corporate card at the podiatrist in the first place.
)