Virtual credit card

Virtual credit cards, an invention of the European banking industry aimed at those too stupid for pet rocks, are marketed primarily through the virtual marketplace known as the Intarweb. 

Regular credit cards were enough of a scam; the bank sends clients plastic cards which likely only cost pennies for the bankers to stamp out and which aren't even real money. Once the unsuspecting client accepts the card, suddenly he starts getting bills from the bank every month for hundreds if not thousands of dollars. At that point it's too late, as the bank already has everyone's money. 

That person laughing all the way to the bank? That'd be the bank manager. Ha, ha, yoke's on you... 

Having gotten away with this, the next scam was the introduction of more new and unexplained service charges. Service? What service? Haven't seen any of that since the days of Robert Service and the Yukon gold rush. If you want to see a real human and not an automatic teller machine at a bank, good luck... banks do employ people, but they're all busy in the back rooms thinking up new service charges. 

So, if the public is gullible enough to pay ever-increasing service charges for service that is non-existent, why not take this one step further... create a banking product that doesn't exist either. 

And so the virtual card was born and launched online, on the pretext that even though it doesn't exist it could be used in e-commerce transactions where only a card number (and not the physical card itself) is required