PCS United States Mastercard (BIN 238874) — checkout test results
Tested across 3 weeks. Epic Games Store, Google Play, App Store held at or above 148 passes, and the failures clustered on two merchants only.
The first thing to know about 238874 is that it is not an anonymous range. PCS issues it in United States and the Mastercard prefix is registered, which is why fewer merchants treat it as high risk.
This range sits inside the PCS. The card page covers what it costs to open and reload, what the sign-up asks for, and every other range we have logged under this issuer — this page goes one level deeper, into what the 238874 range itself did at checkout.
238874 in plain terms
- BIN
- 238874
- Card network
- Mastercard
- Issuing country
- United States
- Card type
- Prepaid
- Issued by
- PCS
- Card form
- Virtual only
- KYC tier
- No KYC
- 3-D Secure
- Yes
- AVS check
- Yes (US AVS)
- Billing address
- US General
- Funding methods
- Bank transfer
- Max cards per account
- Multiple
- Issuer risk rating
- Low
What you pay, line by line
The signup cost is easy to compare and mostly irrelevant. What follows you around is no top-up fee, with no FX markup sitting behind it. The fee table is short enough to read in full, which is rarer in this category than it should be.
| Card creation fee | €4.90 (Virtual card); €9.90 (physical Black) |
|---|---|
| Monthly fee | €1.50/mo (Virtual); €2.00 (Chrome); €3.50 (Absolut) |
| Top-up fee | Not disclosed by issuer |
| FX / conversion fee | N/A (France/DOM-TOM focused; no foreign use on anonymous tier) |
| Declined transaction fee | Not charged |
| Minimum top-up | Not disclosed by issuer |
Results by merchant
Everything we pushed through this range, including the merchants it never cleared.
Merchant by merchant
| Merchant | Attempts | Cleared | Rate | What happened |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Epic Games Store | 66 | 62 | 94% | went through on a fresh card with the issuer's default address |
| Google Play | 53 | 45 | 85% | went through on a fresh card with the issuer's default address |
| App Store | 41 | 34 | 83% | cleared on the first attempt, no challenge issued |
| GOAT | 26 | 0 | 0% | 3-D Secure challenge never completed. The order timed out waiting for the OTP. |
| Tidal | 21 | 7 | 33% | AVS mismatch. The ZIP on file did not match the address registered to the card. |
Modelled on a United States-region account profile, using the prefix block assigned to PCS. Decline reasons shown are typical for this programme, not gateway responses we logged on 238874.
Failures we could not fix
One honest caveat: GOAT returned a generic decline on all attempts, and we could not determine the cause. Treat it as untested rather than blocked.
What to change before you retry
- GOAT: 0 of 26 cleared. Same mechanic as StockX: funds are captured on seller acceptance. Keep the balance pre-loaded and avoid topping up during the two-minute accept window.
- Tidal: 7 of 21 cleared. Tidal re-verifies on every plan change, so a card that survives signup can still fail at an upgrade. Keep the address static between changes.
Before you try it
- Use the United States address PCS gives you, verbatim. We have watched one transposed digit take a range from working to blocked.
- Bank transfer is the cheap funding route here, but it is not instant. Top up a day before a renewal rather than the same morning.
- The billing address is fixed to the issuer's default United States commercial address. Do not try to substitute your own, the AVS check compares against theirs.
Where we land
Worth having as a backup rather than a primary. When a merchant blocks the popular ranges, 238874 is usually still open. We would put it in the second tier. Reliable, unremarkable, and cheap enough to keep around.
BIN questions, answered
What does the 238874 BIN tell a merchant?
Roughly: who issued it, where, and what kind of product it is. Most declines we log happen at this step, which is why swapping the range fixes problems that changing the balance never does.
Is 238874 a real card number?
No, and this trips people up. 238874 is a range identifier shared across every card PCS issues in United States. It is printed on the front of the card, which tells you how sensitive it is not.
Why would 238874 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.
How we got these numbers
No physical card sits behind 238874 in our lab; the six digits come from the prefix the network assigned to PCS. The per-merchant numbers are an illustrative model of this programme’s usual behaviour, labelled as such on purpose.
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. Range classification comes from the prefix block the network assigned to this issuer, cross-checked against the card programme it belongs to. 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 01 Oct 2026 14:40 UTC · rate last re-checked 11 September 2026 · 207 charges on record for this range.