Patent ID: 7131578

Claim:
A method for crediting a customer account maintained by a vendor of services in response to payment received from a customer, the method comprising: issuing, to the customer, a membership account number associated with at least the customer account; receiving, from the customer at a point-of-sale, the membership account number and a payment corresponding to a requested amount of a service offered by the vendor; generating, at the point-of-sale, an authorization message including at least the membership account number and embedded transaction information containing a virtual payment amount identifying both the service offered by the vendor and the requested amount; communicating the embedded transaction information from the point-of-sale to a database server; crediting, in response to the embedded transaction information, the customer account based upon an amount encoded by the virtual payment amount; and electronically transferring funds based upon the_amount encoded by the virtual payment amount from a first account associated with the point-of-sale directly to a second account associated with the vendor.