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04 Guides
How to spot a fake card site.
The crypto-to-card space attracts a lot of fraudsters, for a simple reason: the customer pays up front, in crypto, and therefore has no recourse. This guide gives the signals that let you walk away from a scam in a few minutes. Apply them to us too.
In brief
Five signals are enough to rule out a fake card site, and the first settles it on its own: a card offered in the name of a well-known bank. Nobody can issue in the name of an institution it does not act for. The four others are promised anonymity, no legal notice, a fabricated history, and "support" that contacts you first.
The five signals
- A bank's name
- disqualifying
- Promised anonymity
- disqualifying
- No licence cited
- serious
- Fabricated history
- serious
- Unsolicited contact
- serious
A card in the name of a well-known bank
A site offering to "generate" a Revolut, N26, BNP Paribas or Bank of America card is lying about what it sells. A card bears the name of the institution that issues it, and a third party cannot issue in the name of a bank it does not act for. This signal is sufficient on its own: there is nothing left to check. What you can legitimately choose is the issuing region — a European, US or Hong Kong BIN — and that is almost always the real need behind the question.
No legal notice, no named issuer
A serious payment service names the institution that issues its cards and publishes its licence number. That information can be checked in the public registers of the supervisory authorities. If you cannot find it anywhere on the site, there is no institution behind it. A "terms and conditions" page that names nobody is worth nothing.
A fabricated history
Customer counters that climb on their own, glowing reviews all posted the same week, press logos with no article behind them, "since 2018" on a domain registered three months ago. These signals take an hour to fabricate and exist solely to borrow trust that was never earned. The check takes thirty seconds: a whois lookup gives the domain's creation date, and a press logo is verified by looking for the article.
Support that contacts you first
No serious payment service writes to you out of the blue on Telegram, WhatsApp or Discord. None asks for your password or a one-time code. None demands a deposit to "unlock" an account. All such requests are fraud, whatever name the sender displays — a sender name can be forged.
Why crypto makes everything worse
A card payment can be disputed: there is a procedure, deadlines, an arbiter. A crypto payment confirmed on-chain cannot be disputed, cannot be undone and cannot be recovered. That is what makes this space so attractive to fraudsters, and it is why the checking has to happen before you send. Afterwards there is nothing left to do — not for you, not for anyone.
Apply these five tests to BuyVirtualCards too. We offer no card in the name of a third-party bank, we do not promise anonymity, our terms name the issuing institution and its licence number, we display neither a customer counter nor reviews, and we will never write to you first on a messaging app. Should any of those points change, this guide would be the first place to check it.
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