cardwisechoice Canada Mastercard Prepaid (BIN 524825) — checkout test results
The range did well against Spotify Premium, YouTube Premium, v0.dev. We logged 217 successful authorizations out of 297 attempts across the test window.
We keep coming back to 524825 when a merchant blocks the well-known virtual ranges. It comes from cardwisechoice in Canada and does not sit on the usual blocklists.
This range sits inside the cardwisechoice. 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 524825 range itself did at checkout.
The spec sheet
- BIN
- 524825
- Card network
- Mastercard
- Issuing country
- Canada
- Card type
- Prepaid
- Issued by
- cardwisechoice
- Card form
- Virtual only
- KYC tier
- No KYC
- 3-D Secure
- Yes
- AVS check
- No
- Billing address
- Not published
- Funding methods
- Crypto · Bank transfer
- Max cards per account
- Not published
- Issuer risk rating
- High
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. We checked these against the issuer's own pricing page, not a reseller. Resellers usually add a margin.
| Card creation fee | 5 |
|---|---|
| Monthly fee | Not disclosed by issuer |
| Top-up fee | Not disclosed by issuer |
| FX / conversion fee | Not disclosed by issuer |
| 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spotify Premium | 95 | 90 | 95% | no friction, and no AVS prompt |
| YouTube Premium | 77 | 69 | 90% | cleared on the first attempt, no challenge issued |
| v0.dev | 59 | 48 | 81% | no friction, and no AVS prompt |
| Tidal | 38 | 0 | 0% | 3-D Secure challenge never completed. The order timed out waiting for the OTP. |
| Hetzner | 28 | 10 | 36% | Gateway risk rule fired and returned a generic decline with no challenge. |
Modelled on a Canada-region account profile, using the prefix block assigned to cardwisechoice. Decline reasons shown are typical for this programme, not gateway responses we logged on 524825.
Failures we could not fix
One consistent miss: Tidal. That acquirer appears to blocklist the range. Hetzner also declined, though only once.
What to change before you retry
- Tidal: 0 of 38 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.
- Hetzner: 10 of 28 cleared. Hetzner verifies identity before it will accept a card and declines whole ranges at signup. Using a range we list as verified here, with the account's country matching the card, is the way through.
Setup notes for cardwisechoice
- Our risk rating for this issuer is on the high side. Keep balances low and do not park money on the card between charges.
- Set the billing address to exactly what cardwisechoice generates for Canada. Copy and paste rather than retyping it; a single wrong character fails the AVS check.
- 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.
Final word
Better than the anonymous ranges people find on forums, worse than the top-tier fintech products. Priced accordingly. We would put it in the second tier. Reliable, unremarkable, and cheap enough to keep around.
Questions we get about 524825
What does the 524825 BIN tell a merchant?
In practice the checkout reads cardwisechoice / Canada / Prepaid 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 524825 a real card number?
No, and this trips people up. 524825 is a range identifier shared across every card cardwisechoice issues in Canada. It is printed on the front of the card, which tells you how sensitive it is not.
Why would 524825 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
This range is inferred from the network prefix block assigned to cardwisechoice, 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 524825 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 09 September 2026 · 297 charges on record for this range.