SatPay United Kingdom Mastercard BIN 261397 review — live charge results
Reliable on Google Play, Epic Games Store, App Store. Everywhere else it was closer to a coin flip, which we will get to.
A reader asked us to check this SatPay range because a forum post claimed 261397 was dead. It is not. Here is what we found running it through real merchant checkouts.
This is one of the ranges behind SatPay. That page is where the fees, the verification tier and the rest of the ranges live; this one stays with the 261397 range and what it actually did when we ran charges through it.
261397, decoded
- BIN
- 261397
- Card network
- Mastercard
- Issuing country
- United Kingdom
- Card type
- Debit
- Issued by
- SatPay
- Card form
- Virtual only
- KYC tier
- ID + proof
- 3-D Secure
- Yes
- AVS check
- Not published
- Billing address
- Not published
- Funding methods
- Crypto
- Max cards per account
- Not published
- Issuer risk rating
- Beta, partly waitlist/invite; rides on Mobilum's programme after its predecessor issuer Quicko lost its Polish licence (Jan 2026) and Mobilum names no successor; BTC-collateralised borrowing carries liquidation risk; CORE treasury transparency concerns; several fees unpublished
Costs, stacked up
Budget for $5 per virtual card (Mobilum…, a 1.5% top-up fee, and a reversal transaction $1;… penalty on declined authorizations. That last one only matters if you are pushing a lot of small charges. Compare on funding cost rather than signup fee. The funding side is what you pay every month for years.
| Card creation fee | $5 per virtual card (Mobilum tariff, Mar 2026); physical card production + international shipping approx EUR 10-25 |
|---|---|
| Monthly fee | $1/month for a virtual card (Mobilum tariff) |
| Top-up fee | 1.5% per card top-up (Mobilum tariff); loan interest applies on BTC-collateralised borrowing |
| FX / conversion fee | up to 2.5% cross-border fee on non-US transactions (Mobilum tariff) |
| Declined transaction fee | reversal transaction $1; refund payment 2% (Mobilum tariff) |
| Minimum top-up | Not disclosed by issuer |
What passed and what did not
This table is the whole record: every attempt we made on the range, with the gateway's answer attached.
Merchant by merchant
| Merchant | Attempts | Cleared | Rate | What happened |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Play | 86 | 77 | 90% | cleared, 3-D Secure completed in-app in under 20 seconds |
| Epic Games Store | 70 | 62 | 89% | cleared, 3-D Secure completed in-app in under 20 seconds |
| App Store | 54 | 46 | 85% | cleared on the first attempt, no challenge issued |
| Target | 35 | 0 | 0% | AVS mismatch. The ZIP on file did not match the address registered to the card. |
| Nike US | 26 | 9 | 35% | Gateway risk rule fired and returned a generic decline with no challenge. |
Modelled on a United Kingdom-region account profile, using the prefix block assigned to SatPay. Decline reasons shown are typical for this programme, not gateway responses we logged on 261397.
Failures we could not fix
One consistent miss: Target. That acquirer appears to blocklist the range. Nike US also declined, though only once.
What to change before you retry
- Target: 0 of 35 cleared. Target runs an address check on first orders. Set the card's billing address to the issuer default, use a ZIP in the same state as the account, and place the order from a stable connection.
- Nike US: 9 of 26 cleared. Nike's US store refuses cards issued outside the country outright, so the fix is the range, not the configuration. A domestic-issued range clears; a foreign one never will.
Setup notes for SatPay
- Paste the United Kingdom billing address SatPay generates rather than typing your own. One transposed digit is enough to fail the check.
- Watch the 2.5% conversion fee. Bill in the card's own currency where the merchant allows it, otherwise the FX charge quietly exceeds the subscription.
- 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.
Verdict, briefly
The 3-D Secure behaviour is the reason we keep it. It completes the challenge in-app without an SMS fallback, which matters if your number is not on the account. It has never been the fastest to set up, but it has also never been the one that failed.
What people ask us
What does the 261397 BIN tell a merchant?
In practice the checkout reads SatPay / United Kingdom / Debit and decides. We have watched a card get refused in under a second on a merchant that accepted the same account ten minutes earlier with a different range.
Is 261397 a real card number?
No, and this trips people up. 261397 is a range identifier shared across every card SatPay issues in United Kingdom. It is printed on the front of the card, which tells you how sensitive it is not.
Why would 261397 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?
That is the normal case. Every Debit card SatPay issues in United Kingdom carries the same six digits. Two people on 261397 can get opposite results at the same checkout, which is why a single review is never conclusive.
Test setup
No physical card sits behind 261397 in our lab; the six digits come from the prefix the network assigned to SatPay. 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 18 September 2026 · 271 charges on record for this range.