Uphold Mastercard United States (BIN 550185) — which merchants passed
Straight runs on Steam, Google Play, Google Ads. No 3-D Secure loops, no AVS rejections, no manual review flags.
The first thing to know about 550185 is that it is not an anonymous range. Uphold issues it in United States and the Mastercard prefix is registered, which is why fewer merchants treat it as high risk.
This is one of the ranges behind Uphold. That page is where the fees, the verification tier and the rest of the ranges live; this one stays with the 550185 range and what it actually did when we ran charges through it.
The spec sheet
- BIN
- 550185
- Card network
- Mastercard
- Issuing country
- United States
- Card type
- Debit
- Issued by
- Uphold
- Card form
- Virtual only
- KYC tier
- ID + proof
- 3-D Secure
- Yes (Visa/Mastercard 3DS)
- AVS check
- Yes
- Billing address
- Residential
- Funding methods
- Crypto · Bank transfer
- Max cards per account
- Not specified
- Issuer risk rating
- Low-Medium (FinCEN MSB + FCA; issuer Cross River Bank FDIC)
What you pay, line by line
Pricing, laid out: no issuance fee to open a card, no top-up fee every time you fund it, and a 1.5% conversion fee on conversion. Everything is quoted in USD. Fund the card in the same currency wherever the issuer allows it.
| Card creation fee | Free (virtual); $4.99 (physical, US) |
|---|---|
| Monthly fee | $0 (Essential); $99.99/yr (Elite) |
| Top-up fee | Not disclosed by issuer |
| FX / conversion fee | 1.5% FX markup (Essential); 0% (Elite) |
| Declined transaction fee | Not charged |
| Minimum top-up | No minimum |
Merchant by merchant
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 | 83 | 77 | 93% | cleared on the first attempt, no challenge issued |
| Google Play | 67 | 58 | 87% | went through on a fresh card with the issuer's default address |
| Google Ads | 52 | 44 | 85% | no friction, and no AVS prompt |
| iHerb | 33 | 0 | 0% | AVS mismatch. The ZIP on file did not match the address registered to the card. |
| PlayStation Network | 26 | 9 | 35% | 3-D Secure challenge never completed. The order timed out waiting for the OTP. |
Modelled on a United States-region account profile, using the prefix block assigned to Uphold. Decline reasons shown are typical for this programme, not gateway responses we logged on 550185.
Failures we could not fix
iHerb rejected it outright. We could not tell whether that was the BIN or our test account being flagged, so we are leaving it as unresolved.
What to change before you retry
- iHerb: 0 of 33 cleared. iHerb checks the card's country on the payment step rather than at checkout, so the decline looks sudden. Fix the address first, then the range.
- PlayStation Network: 9 of 26 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.
Getting it to work first time
- Funding is crypto-first. Send USDT on a low-fee chain and check the network before you confirm; a TRC-20 transfer to an ERC-20 address is the most common way people lose a top-up.
- 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.
- Set the billing address to exactly what Uphold generates for United States. Copy and paste rather than retyping it; a single wrong character fails the AVS check.
Verdict, briefly
Better than the anonymous ranges people find on forums, worse than the top-tier fintech products. Priced accordingly. Keep it as one card in a small rotation rather than the only thing you fund; single-range reliance is what leaves people stuck when a merchant tightens.
The things people actually ask
What does the 550185 BIN tell a merchant?
It tells the risk engine three things before your bank is ever contacted: issuer Uphold, country of issue United States, product class Debit. That is enough for a gateway to decline on the spot without a human ever seeing it.
Is 550185 a real card number?
No, and this trips people up. 550185 is a range identifier shared across every card Uphold issues in United States. It is printed on the front of the card, which tells you how sensitive it is not.
Why would 550185 be declined if the range is fine?
Changing one variable at a time is the only way to diagnose this. Address first, then card, then the connection country. We have seen people change all three and learn nothing.
Can thousands of people share the same BIN?
Shared by design. Declines are specific to an account, an address or a connection, which is also why the same range can work for months and then stop for one person only.
How this test was run
No physical card sits behind 550185 in our lab; the six digits come from the prefix the network assigned to Uphold. 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 07 September 2026 · 261 charges on record for this range.