I know that the PCI standard does not allow you to use real credit card numbers on test systems. Visa, Mastercard and Amex supply a list of "test" cards to use. Makes perfect sense, and we have been doing that.
Now, once everything is setup in production, we often need to test the system before allow clients to use it. We have a pre-paid Visa card that we do for the final testing. So this is on our production system, with our payment gateway pointing to the production payment processor. It is 100% the setting that customers will use. We want to check descriptors (what shows up on the statement) and just check that everything will work.
Our PCI guy says that this is totally forbidden. Live credit cards can not be used for testing. Is this true? If so, how you do you do your final testing? Of course any "test" card will fail, as they are not valid cards. We need the card to work, to check the full user experience.
