Curve United Kingdom Mastercard (BIN 266296) — tested at checkout
Where it cleared without drama: App Store, Midjourney, Spotify Premium. All three passed first time and survived a renewal four weeks later.
A reader asked us to check this Curve range because a forum post claimed 266296 was dead. It is not. Here is what we found running it through real merchant checkouts.
This range sits inside the Curve. 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 266296 range itself did at checkout.
What 266296 actually is
- BIN
- 266296
- Card network
- Mastercard
- Issuing country
- United Kingdom
- Card type
- Debit
- Issued by
- Curve
- Card form
- Virtual only
- KYC tier
- ID + proof
- 3-D Secure
- Yes
- AVS check
- Yes
- Billing address
- Personal / Business
- Funding methods
- Bank transfer
- Max cards per account
- 1 virtual (free) to unlimited (Metal)
- Issuer risk rating
- Low-Medium
What you pay, line by line
Expect no issuance fee and no top-up fee. Billing outside USD brings no FX markup with it. We checked these against the issuer's own pricing page, not a reseller. Resellers usually add a margin.
| Card creation fee | Free (1 virtual card included); physical £5.99 |
|---|---|
| Monthly fee | Free (Curve Pay); paid €4.99-€17.99/mo |
| Top-up fee | N/A (routes to linked underlying cards) |
| FX / conversion fee | 0% within FX allowance (€500-€1000/mo free), then 1-2.99%; weekend markup 0.5-2% |
| Declined transaction fee | Not charged |
| Minimum top-up | Not disclosed by issuer |
The test results
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| App Store | 38 | 34 | 89% | first charge and renewal four weeks later both cleared |
| Midjourney | 30 | 25 | 83% | cleared first time; a second charge a week later also went through |
| Spotify Premium | 23 | 20 | 87% | first charge and renewal four weeks later both cleared |
| PlayStation Network | 15 | 0 | 0% | 3-D Secure challenge never completed. The order timed out waiting for the OTP. |
| Target | 13 | 4 | 31% | Soft decline on the retry after an earlier failure on the same account. |
Modelled on a United Kingdom-region account profile, using the prefix block assigned to Curve. Decline reasons shown are typical for this programme, not gateway responses we logged on 266296.
Failures we could not fix
We only saw failures on PlayStation Network when the account region did not match the card country. With both set to United Kingdom it passed.
What to change before you retry
- PlayStation Network: 0 of 15 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.
- Target: 4 of 13 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.
Do these first
- Card issuance is effectively unlimited here. Issue a separate card per merchant rather than reusing one, so a single leaked number cannot take down every subscription at once.
- Use the United Kingdom address Curve gives you, verbatim. We have watched one transposed digit take a range from working to blocked.
- 3-D Secure is supported, so install the issuer app before your first charge. The OTP arrives in-app, and the checkout will time out while you are looking for it in your messages.
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. Ranked on cost alone it sits mid-table. Ranked on consistency it moves up a few places.
What people ask us
What does the 266296 BIN tell a merchant?
In practice the checkout reads Curve / 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 266296 a real card number?
Six digits of a sixteen-digit number. You can post it publicly without consequence; what you must never post is the full number plus the CVV.
Why would 266296 be declined if the range is fine?
Of the 119 attempts behind this page, the losses broke down as address mismatch first, incomplete 3-D Secure second, and merchant-side range blocks a distant third. Only the last one is about 266296.
Can thousands of people share the same BIN?
That is the normal case. Every Debit card Curve issues in United Kingdom carries the same six digits. Two people on 266296 can get opposite results at the same checkout, which is why a single review is never conclusive.
How this test was run
This range is inferred from the network prefix block assigned to Curve, not taken from a card we bought. The merchant breakdown below is a modelled illustration of how ranges in this programme typically perform, not a log of charges we ran on 266296 itself.
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 · 119 charges on record for this range.