A Visa debit card, at least the one I have, can "pretend" to be a credit card so you can enter it into a credit card payment form same as with an actual Visa cr

A Visa debit card, at least the one I have, can "pretend" to be a credit card so you can enter it into a credit card payment form same as with an actual Visa credit card. It has worked for every online payment I tried so far. As far as I know, you can't do this with a Maestro card (at least not with mine). The advantage of that over an actual credit card is security and cost control: I have a separate bank account only for my Visa debit card. This account has overdraft disabled and will bounce payments instead at no cost to me. I keep a balance close to zero on this account. When I want to pay something online, I quickly do a transfer in that amount from my main account to my "Visa account", then pay. This will immediately subtract funds from my account, or the payment will immediately fail if there isn't enough (but there will be as I just transferred it). This means my card is fraud-proof except in the unlikely case of someone managing to make a payment during the couple of seconds between me pressing transfer in my bank app and pressing pay wherever I'm paying. And even if they did that, they'd be limited to the amount of my intended purchase.