491166 Virtual Card Review - United Arab Emirates Visa Debit
Straight runs on Steam, Google Play, Epic Games Store. No 3-D Secure loops, no AVS rejections, no manual review flags.
This range belongs to Kolo. Issued out of United Arab Emirates on Visa, classed as Debit by most acquirers.
Reading the 491166 prefix
- BIN
- 491166
- Card network
- Visa
- Issuing country
- United Arab Emirates
- Card type
- Debit
- Issued by
- Kolo
- Card form
- Virtual only
- KYC tier
- ID + proof
- 3-D Secure
- Yes
- AVS check
- No
- Billing address
- Global
- Funding methods
- Crypto
- Max cards per account
- Multiple
- Issuer risk rating
- Medium
Costs, stacked up
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. Compare on funding cost rather than signup fee. The funding side is what you pay every month for years.
| Card creation fee | Free |
|---|---|
| Monthly fee | Free |
| Top-up fee | — |
| FX / conversion fee | — |
| Declined transaction fee | — |
| Minimum top-up | — |
Where 491166 clears, and where it does not
Merchant by merchant, in the order we charged them. The rates below count renewals as well as first charges.
Merchant by merchant
| Merchant | Attempts | Cleared | Rate | What happened |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steam | 82 | 73 | 89% | first charge and renewal four weeks later both cleared |
| Google Play | 67 | 60 | 90% | no friction, and no AVS prompt |
| Epic Games Store | 51 | 43 | 84% | went through on a fresh card with the issuer's default address |
| Nintendo eShop | 33 | 0 | 0% | Geo mismatch. The connection country did not match the card's country of issue. |
| Best Buy | 25 | 9 | 36% | Geo mismatch. The connection country did not match the card's country of issue. |
Run from a United Arab Emirates-region account between 16 Jul to 10 Sep 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
If you buy from Nintendo eShop, use something else. It declined consistently. Best Buy was fine on retry.
What to change before you retry
- Nintendo eShop: 0 of 33 cleared. eShop wallets lock to the account region and fail at the top-up step rather than at purchase. Change the account region first, then attach the card.
- Best Buy: 9 of 25 cleared. High-value orders land in manual review. Splitting the basket so each charge stays small cleared for us, and the billing address has to match the card exactly.
Do these first
- Set the billing address to exactly what Kolo generates for United Arab Emirates. Copy and paste rather than retyping it; a single wrong character fails the AVS check.
- You can hold several cards at once (Multiple). Split them by merchant, not by amount. It makes a failed charge far easier to trace.
- This is an anonymous-account product. There is no meaningful account recovery, so export the card details and the billing address the moment you create them.
Final word
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. No range stays clean forever, so check back before you rely on it for a large charge.
What people ask us
What does the 491166 BIN tell a merchant?
It tells the risk engine three things before your bank is ever contacted: issuer Kolo, country of issue United Arab Emirates, product class Debit. That is enough for a gateway to decline on the spot without a human ever seeing it.
Is 491166 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 491166 be declined if the range is fine?
Of the 258 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 491166.
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 Kolo card, funded it, and pushed 258 charges through live merchant checkout pages between 16 Jul to 10 Sep 2026. Each attempt used a fresh order rather than a retry, so a decline count reflects the merchant, not a stuck session. 185 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. 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 13 Sep 2026 14:40 UTC · rate last re-checked 12 September 2026 · 258 charges on record for this range.