PSTNET is a virtual-card front end with plenty of virtual cards and no published paperwork behind it

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

If you have been trying to get an ordinary bank card and the bank says no, PSTNET is probably on your shortlist, because it promises a virtual card in minutes, with crypto going in and card payments coming out. That promise is real. Everything around it is thinner than the promise. PSTNET sells a large catalogue of virtual cards aimed at advertisers and media buyers; its public pages do not name the legal entity behind the service, the country it is incorporated in, or any licence it holds. Users write in about crypto withdrawals that take a fortnight and cards that stop working without notice. The service is live, the product is specific, and the paper work is missing. I scored it 5.3 out of 10, and I would rather tell you where that number comes from than hand you a paragraph of praise.

The conditions described here are current as of October 28, 2026.

The short version: 5.3 out of 10

The shape of that table is the whole review. Accessibility is its best feature and it deserves credit. Everything downstream of that is where the doubt sits: what you pay, what you can buy, how long your money takes to arrive, and what happens when something goes wrong.

Who this suits: advertisers and media buyers who need many virtual cards, private BINs, and an API to push card numbers into their own systems. If that is your job, the product is aimed at you and the catalogue is genuinely broad. Who it does not suit: anyone treating this as a normal everyday bank card, anyone who needs a physical card, Apple Pay or Google Pay, anyone who needs to pay for fuel or transfer money, and anyone who wants to know which company is holding their money.

Will they give you the card?

Yes, to almost everyone — with a caveat the site does not define. The company’s own wording is that its PST solutions “may not be available to all customers”, and it publishes no country list. An earlier check of the card’s materials described the service as worldwide except restricted countries, with the United States restricted, and a July 2026 Trustpilot review reports a user whose country was no longer supported.

That last point deserves emphasis. Eligibility here is not a stable list you can consult. The way I would put it: the gate is the company’s discretion, exercised through the same automated checks that decide your application, and it can change for your country without a published notice. Nobody can promise you from the outside that your country is inside or outside it. You find out by applying.

There is a second, subtler point about who gets through the KYC door, and I will come back to it in the risks section, because it is where nationality rather than residence does the work.

How to get it

The sign-up path is short and modern. You register with Google or an email address, and the card comes out as “instant card issuance” — that is the site’s phrasing, and for virtual cards it is the part of the promise that holds up best in practice. Identity verification runs through Sumsub as a “full eKYC execution”, with automated document and biometric checks. What documents are accepted, whether proof of address is required, and what the age threshold is: the public pages do not say. Across the general card market, prepaid and debit cards are usually available to adults from 18, and some issuers set higher limits, but I found no such statement on PSTNET’s pages and I will not invent one.

The catalogue is where this card differs from its competitors. There is a long list of virtual card types:

• Ultima, a single virtual card with 3D-Secure
• PST Private, with 22 BINs, unlimited card issuance and a free API
• Google Ads, 12 BINs
• TikTok Ads, 3 BINs
• Advertisement, 15 BINs
• Virtual prepaid, Virtual debit and Platinum cards

The card network is not stated on the pages I read, and no physical card is listed anywhere in the catalogue. Delivery is not stated either, which follows from virtual-only, but the absence of any physical option is itself the finding: if your plan needs a card in your hand, this is the wrong product and no amount of good intent changes that.

Fees: what it really costs

Prices here are messier than they should be, and the mess is itself informative. The cards page says Ultima is “from 7$ card price”. The Ultima page says issuance and monthly maintenance after the first month cost “$16”. Those two statements are not the same product description, and third-party figures in circulation — a 2% top-up fee, $7 monthly maintenance, $99 a year, per techeconomy.ng and a 2022 Payments Dive press release, none of it confirmed by the card — differ from both. I would not budget from any of these. I would open the app and read the price of the specific card in front of you on the day you sign up.

Here is what I could actually establish:

Three ordinary payments, and what they cost you:

• A subscription or a shop in dollars, bought with an Ultima card. The 0% transaction fee on PST Private and the 0% withdrawal fee are the friendliest numbers anywhere in this material. What I cannot tell you is the FX fee, because no page states one, and I am not going to guess at a percentage.
• A purchase in a currency other than dollars. The card is described as a USD virtual card, so a euro or naira payment involves a conversion at some rate set by someone other than you. The rate is not published, the fee on top is not published, and the spread is the part that quietly costs you.
• A card purchase at a merchant that declines. The card’s own category list — gambling, transfers, fuel and other closed doors — means declines are not always the merchant’s caution. Some declines are the card’s design working as intended.

The zero fees, I want to be fair about, are genuinely unusual. Most cards in this category bury their economics in the conversion rate. The awkward part is that the two prices I can quote disagree, and the ones I cannot quote are the ones that would decide your month.

Top up options

The card takes crypto. An earlier check described the funding method as an instant crypto deposit into the PSTNET account, and that is as precise as the official material gets: the site’s own page does not list coins or networks. Third-party listings — a Chrome extension listing and a 2022 press release, neither confirmed by the card — name USDT on TRC20 and ERC20, plus BTC.

Those unofficial networks matter more than they look, because of how the underlying rails work. USDT exists on many chains, including Ethereum, Tron, Solana, Polygon and Avalanche; ERC-20 is Ethereum’s token standard, proposed in November 2015, and its gas is paid only in ETH, so a wallet holding USDT and no ETH cannot send. Tron prices fees differently, through bandwidth and energy resources that are often paid by burning TRX. So “send USDT” is not one action but several, and picking the wrong one is expensive.

Here is the rule I would give anyone topping up a card like this, and it is a rule about mechanics rather than a trick: check that the network and coin your provider expects is the one you are about to use, before you press send. Blockchain transfers are irreversible. A deposit sent on an unsupported network, or to an address belonging to another network, can be lost outright or need manual support intervention with no guarantee of recovery. Circle stopped supporting USDC on Tron in February 2024, which is a reminder that “the stablecoin I hold” and “the stablecoin this network carries” are not the same sentence. Tether also says it disables tokens in wallets on the OFAC sanctions list and has frozen funds tied to illicit activity — stablecoins are not censorship-proof, and that cuts both ways.

Also not stated officially: the minimum top-up, who pays the network fee for the deposit, and whether fiat top-ups exist at all. On-chain network fees for your deposit are charged by the blockchain, not by the card company, so budget for them separately from anything PSTNET charges.

On the way out, the card advertises a 0% withdrawal fee and, for PST Private, an express withdrawal. User reports describe crypto withdrawals taking as long as 14 days, with the company attributing this to manual handling. What happens to a remaining balance if you close the account is not stated. Programme closures in this industry typically mean a notice period, then loading and spending stop, then you are asked to withdraw what is left — so if you ever decide to leave, take the money out before you stop using it.

Paying with it every day

This is where the score drops to 3, and the reason is structural rather than a matter of quality. Every card in the catalogue is virtual. There is no plastic, no ATM access described, and Apple Pay and Google Pay support is not stated anywhere I could read.

The blocked merchant categories are published on the Ultima page, which is unusually honest and also unusually limiting:

• Gambling
• Dating
• Money transfers
• Quasi-cash
• Fuel and EV charging
• Freight and trucking
• Brokerage
• Massage

The corresponding category codes are listed too: 6211, 7273, 7297, 7995, 6051, 4829, 7800-7802, 5552, 5533, 5541, 5542, 5172, 4215, 4214. Behind those numbers is the mechanism. A merchant category code is the four-digit number under ISO 18245 that classifies a business by what it sells, assigned when the business starts accepting cards. MCC 7995 covers gambling — casinos, betting, lotteries — and many issuers block it on specific cards by policy rather than by law, with the blocked list differing by issuer. So the fuel-station decline you will see on this card is not a failure of the payment system; it is a line item in a rule the issuer wrote down and published.

There is a second class of decline that has nothing to do with category rules and much to do with how card infrastructure reads BINs. A card number starts with an issuer identification number of 6 or 8 digits that names the institution; the rest is an account identifier and a check digit. Merchants look up that BIN and can see which institution and country issued the card, and some apply extra scrutiny when the issuer country differs from the customer’s billing address. Address Verification Service, which compares the numeric parts of the billing address a buyer typed against issuer records, is mainly offered in the US, Canada and the UK and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards. That combination — a prepaid or foreign BIN, a billing address that does not match it, and an AVS check that cannot pass — is the ordinary reason a legitimate payment fails at a merchant that has never heard of PSTNET. Users report declines on Amazon digital goods and at Stripe merchants, which fits that pattern exactly.

On the positive side: 3D-Secure is on Ultima, which adds an identity step to online payments where the issuer assesses risk and either approves frictionlessly or challenges the cardholder with a one-time code or biometric. Visa’s brand is Visa Secure, Mastercard’s is Identity Check, and EMV 3-D Secure 2, published in 2016, supports one-time passcodes and app-based authentication. For an online-only card this is close to essential, and its presence is a point in the card’s favour.

Rewards exist in one place: PST Private offers 3% cashback. The conditions, the cap and the currency of payout are not stated, so I would treat the figure as a headline rather than a plan.

Two more things you will look for and not find. No mobile app is listed; what exists is a Chrome browser extension, whose ratings I did not read. And there is no dispute or chargeback information on the pages I read. That absence matters more than a policy would: a chargeback is a refund ordered by the issuer with reason codes such as fraud, duplicate billing or goods not received, US debit card reversal rights come from Regulation E and credit card rights from Regulation Z, and prepaid-card coverage varies and should not be assumed. The card’s restricted-usage guidance touches chargebacks and refunds for deactivated virtual cards, which is a narrower thing than a general dispute process.

What can go wrong

I want to be precise here, because “no official incidents found” and “no incidents” are different statements and I found the first one.

The company’s own pages name no incidents. Users report plenty. On Trustpilot, read on 2026-10-21, there are 381 reviews, 51 of them in the last twelve months, with 67% five stars and 25% one star; the site itself claims 458 reviews. Trustpilot has withheld a TrustScore from this profile over a guideline breach with fake reviews removed. The themes cluster into four groups, and I would note that a profile with a heavy one-star share is not automatically fake — it may simply mean that the people who succeed stay silent and the people who fail write in:

• Slow crypto withdrawals, February to April 2026, with the company saying processing is manual; users describe up to 14 days
• Crypto deposits held for days to weeks, which the company attributes to KYT checks
• Account and card suspensions without clear notice, March to July 2026
• Declines at some merchants, April to June 2026, plus KYC and country problems, March to July 2026

Now the structural risks, which are larger than any single complaint.

Who is holding your money is not stated. The balance is custodial — held in a PSTNET account — so the provider holds the credentials and you must trust them completely. The alternative, a self-custody-linked card, keeps funds in your own wallet until the moment of payment, but then you carry sole responsibility for key loss, for phishing, and for clipboard-hijacking malware that silently swaps a copied address. Both models carry risks; the difference is whose risk it is. A seed phrase, typically 12 to 24 words, is an unencrypted form of the private key — anyone who obtains it can restore the wallet and spend the funds — and blockchain transfers are typically irreversible, with no built-in recovery because the network cannot freeze or return what is gone. This is not a theoretical worry for this category. Custodial platforms have a documented record: Mt. Gox with about US$350 million reported stolen in 2011-2014, Coincheck at about US$400 million in 2018, and Ronin Network at US$625 million in 2022. If your balance sits with a provider whose entity and jurisdiction are not published, you are taking counterparty risk on top of all of it.

Whether the money is safeguarded is not stated. In the EU, electronic money institutions must safeguard customer funds by segregating them in dedicated accounts or insuring them, and even then those funds are not the same as bank deposits and may not be covered by a deposit guarantee scheme. A card itself is a payment service regulated separately from the crypto side, which means a crypto card often depends on two licences — custody or exchange on one side, e-money or payment services on the other. PSTNET’s pages name neither.

Where you are, not where you live, is what gets screened. KYC rules require regulated businesses to verify customers and assess risk as part of anti-money-laundering law, including ongoing monitoring and suspicious-activity reporting. In the EU, due diligence covers name, address, date of birth, nationality and identity documentation, a sanctions check, the purpose of the relationship, and whether you are a politically exposed person. In the US, the customer identification programme requires name, date of birth, address and an identification number, with electronic KYC also validating proof-of-address documents against records. Nationality is recorded and screened separately from residence because sanctions screening and issuer risk policy are often applied to citizenship and country of birth as well as to the country of address. This is why KYC problems and country problems appear together in the complaint themes: they are the same mechanism seen from two sides. And if due diligence cannot be completed, EU rules require the institution to refrain from the transaction or relationship and, where necessary, end existing relationships — which is the honest explanation for an account that closes while you are waiting for a document.

The regulatory picture underneath also moves. MiCA, the EU’s markets-in-crypto-assets regulation (Regulation (EU) 2023/1114), took legal effect in June 2023 under ESMA’s account of it; its rules on asset-referenced and e-money tokens applied from 30 June 2024, with the remaining provisions including crypto-asset service provider rules from 30 December 2024. Under Article 48, e-money tokens may be issued only by a credit institution or an electronic money institution. The transitional period lets providers already operating under national law continue only until 1 July 2026 or until they receive or are refused a MiCA authorisation, whichever comes first — a date that has now passed, which means any provider that was relying on national permissions has either been authorised or has not. ESMA keeps an interim register of authorised CASPs, white papers and non-compliant entities, and that register is where I would start if you want to know what a provider’s standing is. In the US, FinCEN guidance (FIN-2013-G001) treats administrators and exchangers of convertible virtual currency as money transmitters, while people merely buying goods are not.

Networks can pull the rug. Visa and Mastercard do not issue crypto cards to consumers themselves; they license issuers and can suspend a programme. Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022 and the FTX US debit card was wound down by its issuer. WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes. Programme closures typically run a notice period, then stop spending and loading, then ask users to withdraw remaining balances. That is the category’s ordinary ending, and it is why the missing entity name on this particular site is the risk that stays with you longest.

Two smaller things, honestly. Support: no direct channel is listed on the pages I read; updates go out via Twitter and Telegram, which is a poor substitute when your withdrawal has been pending for eleven days. And card-level security: 3D-Secure is present, AML transaction monitoring is described as real-time, but card freeze and two-factor authentication are not stated, and neither is any safeguarding arrangement.

What to take instead

I looked at three alternatives with published information of their own. None of them is a clean answer; they are different shapes of compromise, and I list them so you can see the trade rather than take my word for the ranking.

Where each is stronger:

• Cardex is the only one of the four that publishes both a virtual and a physical card and names its networks, and it claims reach in 200+ countries. Cardex is also the only alternative above PSTNET’s score. Its catch: no stated fees, a conversion mechanism that decides the rate for you, and an App Store listing centred on naira, which narrows who it actually suits.
• CardFlow is the cheapest to start — virtual card creation is free — and funds from four sources including naira bank transfer, which is more funding routes than PSTNET officially documents. It is aimed at Nigeria and describes itself as “Nigeria’s smartest fintech card platform” while also claiming to serve “Nigerians and global users”. Its fees are simply not stated.
• HyperCard is the most straightforward concept: deposit crypto, spend in dollars or euros, no fee disclosure to argue with because none is published. Its App Store page says the card works in “more than 176 countries” — that is acceptance, not eligibility, and the official pages state no country list. Do not read it as a green light for where you live.

The honest summary of this comparison: PSTNET has the deepest card catalogue and the most specific product for its actual audience, and the other three have narrower catalogues and better-published basics. If what you need is many cards with private BINs, there is nothing in this list that replaces it. If what you need is to buy your own groceries with a card that behaves like a normal card, PSTNET’s blocked fuel, transfers and gambling categories rule it out regardless of the score.

Who I would recommend it to

Three kinds of person, in descending order of confidence.

First, media buyers and advertisers who need many virtual cards, private BINs, an API and 3% cashback. The catalogue is built for them — Google Ads with 12 BINs, TikTok Ads with 3, Advertisement with 15, PST Private with 22 and unlimited issuance — and if you fall inside that description, this is a tool, not a bank account pretending to be something else.

Second, anyone in a country where an ordinary card is genuinely out of reach and who only needs to pay a handful of online merchants in dollars, accepts virtual-only, accepts a USD card, does not need fuel, transfers, gambling or cash, and is willing to keep only a small balance here. Under those conditions the service does what it says on the tin.

Third — and I say this more reluctantly — anyone who has read the section above and decided they can absorb the risks personally: an unpublished legal entity, no stated safeguarding, a custodial balance, Trustpilot complaints about withdrawals of up to 14 days and unannounced card blocks. If you take this route, three habits reduce the damage. Keep the balance small. Read the category list before you need it, so a decline is not a surprise in a taxi rank. And withdraw rather than hold, because the fastest way a custodial balance becomes yours again is the moment you decide to leave.

Who I would not recommend it to: anyone who needs a physical card or Apple Pay or Google Pay; anyone paying for fuel, EV charging or transfers; anyone who will be annoyed by a KYC check that never resolves; and anyone treating this as a place to keep savings. It scores 5.3 out of 10, and the 5.3 is not a rounding error I could round up — it is the sum of a strong top line and a weak foundation.

Frequently asked questions

What is PSTNET?

PSTNET is a platform that issues virtual payment cards funded from crypto rather than from a bank account. It sells a catalogue rather than a single product: an Ultima virtual card with 3D-Secure, a PST Private card with 22 BINs and a free API, cards aimed at Google Ads, TikTok Ads and advertising work, and prepaid, debit and Platinum variants. The cards are virtual only. No physical card appears in the catalogue, and the card network is not stated on the pages I read.

Is PSTNET a bank?

On its public pages, nothing says it is. The site’s wording is “PST solutions may not be available to all customers”, and it names no legal entity, no country of incorporation and no licence. Identity checks run through Sumsub as a full eKYC process, which tells you a vendor is verifying you but not who is regulated. The balance is custodial, held in a PSTNET account. If knowing which institution stands behind your money matters to you, this is the first thing to ask them directly.

How do I get a PSTNET card?

You register with Google or an email address, complete the automated document and biometric checks through Sumsub, and the card is issued instantly — the site’s phrase is “instant card issuance”, which for virtual cards is the claim that holds up best. Documents accepted, proof of address and the age threshold are not stated publicly. Eligibility by country is likewise not published; the service is described as worldwide with restrictions, with the United States limited on an earlier check.

Does PSTNET require KYC?

Yes. Sign-up includes a “full eKYC execution” via Sumsub, covering automated ID and biometric verification. What that means in practice is that the KYC level is uniform, with no tiers published, and that a failure to complete due diligence can end the relationship rather than merely delay it. Under EU rules, if due diligence cannot be completed, the institution must refrain from the transaction or relationship and, where necessary, close existing relationships. Users report KYC and country problems in the March to July 2026 window.

How do I top up the card?

With crypto, described as an instant crypto deposit into your PSTNET account. The site’s own page does not list coins or networks; unofficial listings — a Chrome extension listing and a 2022 press release — name USDT on TRC20 and ERC20 and BTC. Check the network before you send, because transfers are irreversible and a deposit on an unsupported network can be lost. The minimum, who pays the network fee and whether fiat top-ups exist are all not stated.

How much does PSTNET cost, and are the fees really zero?

Some are. Ultima shows a 0% withdrawal fee, and PST Private lists 0% transaction, declined-payment, refund and withdrawal fees. But the card price is inconsistent across pages: “from 7$ card price” on the cards page against “$16” for issuance and monthly maintenance after the first month on the Ultima page. Unofficial figures in circulation are a 2% top-up fee plus $7 monthly and $99 yearly. The top-up fee and the FX fee are not stated at all, and those are the two that would actually shape a month.

Can I add it to Apple Pay or Google Pay?

On the evidence I found, no — not that it is blocked, but that it is simply not described. Apple Pay and Google Pay support are not stated on the pages I read, and there is no mobile app listed, only a Chrome browser extension. In the wider category, Apple Pay replaces the card number with a device-specific number in the Secure Element with a one-time dynamic code per payment, and an issuer can restrict a tokenised number to specific channels — but none of that helps if this card has no published wallet integration.

Where can I use the card, and what will be declined?

Online, anywhere cards are accepted, in dollars, with 3D-Secure on Ultima. The Ultima page publishes the blocked categories: gambling, dating, money transfers, quasi-cash, fuel and EV charging, freight and trucking, brokerage and massage. Expect declines at fuel stations and transfer services by design. Separately, merchants may decline a prepaid or foreign BIN on their own risk policy, and address verification generally fails for foreign-issued cards, which explains user reports of declines at Amazon digital and Stripe merchants.

Is PSTNET safe?

There are real safeguards on the card — 3D-Secure on Ultima and real-time AML transaction monitoring — but card freeze and two-factor authentication are not stated, nor is any safeguarding arrangement for the balance. The balance is custodial, so provider risk, hack risk and counterparty risk sit with you, and the entity holding it is not named. Trustpilot shows 381 reviews with 67% five stars and 25% one star, and no TrustScore currently displayed. Treat it as a spending tool, not a store of value.

Is PSTNET worth it, and how do I close an account?

Worth it if you are an advertiser needing many cards with private BINs and an API; not worth it as a general everyday card, given the blocked categories, virtual-only format and published complaints about withdrawals of up to 14 days and unannounced card suspensions. What happens to a leftover balance when you close an account is not stated, so if you decide to leave, withdraw what you have while the account still works — in this category, closures typically mean a notice period, then spending and loading stop, then you are asked to withdraw.

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