How to Use Apple Cash for Anonymous Online Purchases

All right. Let's see here. What else do we got? I guess we just have one. How do we left? Yeah

let's talk about how to pay with an Apple Cash Card number. And this is like a temporary number

that you can create, right? Yeah. So in case you're confused, because there's a lot of Apple

products with incredibly similar names. Apple Cash is when someone sends you money through iMessage

This accumulates into like a special Apple Cash Card. Not to be confused with like the actual

Apple Card or Apple Pay, which is the service, or the Apple Cash Savings, which is a different

thing entirely. So previously, you could only pay with your Apple Cash Balance via Apple Pay

You know, if you go up to like a wireless payment terminal, then you can use it there

or you could transfer it to your bank. But now you can tie your Apple Cash to a virtual card

number to buy something online without Apple Pay. You know, just entering in a credit card

number, you can create a temporary credit card number. So first, you need to update to iOS 17.4

Then you open up the Wallet app, and you tap on your Apple Cash Card. And you should see a banner

that says, you know, set up your card number. But otherwise, you can hit the three dots menu in the

upper corner and tap on card number. Then you hit set up virtual card number at the top of the screen

You know, you authenticate with Face ID, whatever. And then once you have that set up

when you're in Safari, you go to enter in your credit card number, and you'll see like the

special, like, you know, number pad keyboard with like a row of saved credit card info in there

You scroll all the way to the end where you'll see Apple Cash, and you just tap on that

And it'll autofill the temporary Apple Cash card number. You can also find this inside the Wallet

app and copy and paste it. But you know, the neat thing is that it's super easy to throw the card

number away and get a new one. From the Wallet app, you can just tap request new card number

and it'll just give you a new one immediately. And it generates a new security code automatically

every time you autofill the card number. And it expires 24 hours afterwards. So you don't have to

worry about somebody like stealing your credit card info or anything like that. You know, so really, if you want to buy stuff anonymously online, this is a great way to do it. Because

your bank won't have a record of the purchase and the purchase history is saved locally to your

iPhone. Oh, wow. So you could use this on Silk Road. You're telling me. Great way to make purchases

I would never endorse such a service like that. Well, Leander Keeney, he has, and he probably

will in a future Cult of Match story. So this is cool. You know, there's so many great features

with Apple Card. I talked last week about how I stopped using it because it doesn't integrate with

any of the financial services applications that just track your spending. Well, to be clear

this isn't related to the Apple Card. This is a separate thing entirely

Oh, but I thought it does use your Apple Card for the purchases though, right

No, it goes entirely through Apple Cash using the fake card number. Oh, gosh. You even said that earlier, and I still didn't make that connection. Okay, got it

Well, then never mind. But it's still worth mentioning. I was going to mention this anyway

because you reminded me of the messages that I received last week of people saying that their

financial apps that they use to track their spending and stuff are slowly starting to

support Apple Cards. That seems like maybe something that Apple is working on. Just to

kind of rewind, I was mentioning last week that I've stopped using my Apple Card because I don't

want to track my spending within the Apple Card app or within the Wallet app. I want to have it

import transactions into my financial tracking app, which is currently Monarch, which they don't

do because you can't import transactions from Apple because you can only do it within their

own app, which I found to be incredibly irritating. And so I stopped using the card entirely

It seems like maybe they're fixing that problem. And some of you have reported that your apps that

you're using... There's one in particular, which one of you told me about that I can't remember

the name of now, but that all of a sudden, it's starting to be rolled out and you can actually

import your transactions now. So hopefully, Apple does fix that because I would not want to use the

Apple Card until that's fixed. Let's see. Still no Apple Card for us Canadians. Wow, really? No

Apple Card in the UK? Holy moly. Okay, so why NAB integrates the Apple Card now? Okay, that was one

of them, but there was another one as well that I was not super familiar with

But in any case, this story has nothing to do with Apple Card