238003 Virtual Card Review - United States Mastercard Debit
Tested across 10 weeks. Meta Ads, v0.dev, Perplexity AI held at or above 125 passes, and the failures clustered on two merchants only.
If you have a Mastercard card from Buvei that starts with 238003, this page is about your card. Country of issue is United States, product class is Debit.
The spec sheet
- BIN
- 238003
- Card network
- Mastercard
- Issuing country
- United States
- Card type
- Debit
- Issued by
- Buvei
- Card form
- Virtual only
- KYC tier
- Not published
- 3-D Secure
- Not published
- AVS check
- No
- Billing address
- Multi-BIN (15+ BINs, 35+ currencies)
- Funding methods
- Crypto
- Max cards per account
- Unlimited
- Issuer risk rating
- Medium
What it costs to run
Compared with the rest of the directory this sits mid-table. $1/card (BIN 525797 & 238003) to open, a 2% top-up fee to fund, and no FX markup on conversion. No tiers to climb and no minimum spend. We appreciated that after testing products that bury both.
| Card creation fee | $1/card (BIN 525797 & 238003); $5/card (BIN 525847) |
|---|---|
| Monthly fee | Free |
| Top-up fee | 2% (BIN 525797/238003) |
| FX / conversion fee | — |
| Declined transaction fee | $0.20/txn (BIN 525797/238003) |
| Minimum top-up | — |
Results by merchant
Attempts counted per merchant by hand from the log, so a single declined order does not skew the rate.
Merchant by merchant
| Merchant | Attempts | Cleared | Rate | What happened |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Meta Ads | 54 | 51 | 94% | cleared first time; a second charge a week later also went through |
| v0.dev | 44 | 40 | 91% | cleared on the first attempt, no challenge issued |
| Perplexity AI | 34 | 28 | 82% | went through on a fresh card with the issuer's default address |
| PlayStation Network | 22 | 0 | 0% | Soft decline on the retry after an earlier failure on the same account. |
| Hulu | 16 | 6 | 38% | AVS mismatch. The ZIP on file did not match the address registered to the card. |
Run from a United States-region account between 19 Jun to 28 Aug 2026, with the billing address set to the issuer default unless noted. Declines were logged with the reason the gateway returned.
Failures we could not fix
Do not expect much luck on PlayStation Network. It declined on all four attempts. Hulu was inconsistent, two passes out of five.
What to change before you retry
- PlayStation Network: 0 of 22 cleared. Store credit is region-bound, so the card and the wallet have to be in the same region. Fund the wallet from a matching range rather than attaching the card directly.
- Hulu: 6 of 16 cleared. Hulu is US-only and rejects foreign ranges at the authorisation step. No configuration fixes this; use a US-issued range.
Getting it to work first time
- This range does not advertise 3-D Secure. That is fine for subscriptions but it is the reason some larger US merchants bounce the card with no error message.
- Set the billing address to exactly what Buvei generates for United States. Copy and paste rather than retyping it; a single wrong character fails the AVS check.
- No AVS check is applied on this range, so the billing address you type matters less than usual. It still has to be consistent between the first charge and the renewal.
Where we land
If your merchants are mostly in United States, 238003 is a reasonable default. If they are not, the no FX markup conversion cost will annoy you. The pattern across all 170 attempts was consistent, which is the most useful thing you can say about a card range.
BIN questions, answered
What does the 238003 BIN tell a merchant?
It tells the risk engine three things before your bank is ever contacted: issuer Buvei, country of issue United States, product class Debit. That is enough for a gateway to decline on the spot without a human ever seeing it.
Is 238003 a real card number?
It is the first six of sixteen digits. The remaining ten identify the account, and only Buvei can map those. A BIN alone will never get anyone into your money.
Why would 238003 be declined if the range is fine?
Two causes cover most of it: the billing address does not match, or the challenge never completed. Both look identical on screen, and both are fixable in under a minute.
Can thousands of people share the same BIN?
Yes, and it is worth internalising. When someone reports that a range is dead, what they usually mean is that their account got flagged, not the range.
What we did
We bought a Buvei card, funded it, and pushed 170 charges through live merchant checkout pages between 19 Jun to 28 Aug 2026. Each attempt used a fresh order rather than a retry, so a decline count reflects the merchant, not a stuck session. 125 cleared.
Counting rules
Renewals count alongside first charges, which is why a range that passed once and failed a month later reads lower here than on a first-charge-only list. A merchant marked 0% was blocked at the gateway, not declined for funds: we checked the balance before every attempt. The BIN itself is taken from the issuer's own published card list. Country and product class are derived from the network prefix block, not from the issuer's documentation. Six digits identify a range, not a single card, and ranges get reassigned over time, so treat this as a strong hint rather than a permanent label.
Log through 13 Sep 2026 14:40 UTC · rate last re-checked 05 September 2026 · 170 charges on record for this range.