Only if they actually charge to the credit card. If you never process the card and simply give them their 'digital content' or (in this case) mail a card to an

Only if they actually charge to the credit card. If you never process the card and simply give them their 'digital content' or (in this case) mail a card to an address then you aren't violating anything. It'd be the equivalent of making a magnetic card reader out of cardboard and pretending to swipe it before handing someone a cup of lemonade. Even if you never mail the card I don't see where you would have anything legally binding as you never processed the card in the first place. (IAANAL) For one system I worked on we did this for legitimate purposes. It's a long story but it was around devices people would walk up to and use their card to buy stuff... if the machine was unable to process we would simply give them their stuff. The internet connection was crap and it failed about 20% of the transactions and we ---really--- did not want this thing to come back with an error 20% of the time, so it was just better to give them away for free. Eventually we fixed the internet issue but kept the code in there just in the off chance it happened again.