Happay Mastercard India (BIN 551846) — which merchants passed
Where it cleared without drama: App Store, Google Play, Steam. All three passed first time and survived a renewal four weeks later.
The first thing to know about 551846 is that it is not an anonymous range. Happay issues it in India and the Mastercard prefix is registered, which is why fewer merchants treat it as high risk.
This range sits inside the Happay. 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 551846 range itself did at checkout.
Reading the 551846 prefix
- BIN
- 551846
- Card network
- Mastercard
- Issuing country
- India
- Card type
- Prepaid
- Issued by
- Happay
- Card form
- Virtual only
- KYC tier
- ID + proof
- 3-D Secure
- Yes
- AVS check
- No
- Billing address
- IN General
- Funding methods
- Bank transfer
- Max cards per account
- 10+ free with limits / Unlimited virtual
- Issuer risk rating
- Medium
The fee stack
The signup cost is easy to compare and mostly irrelevant. What follows you around is no top-up fee, with a 1% conversion fee sitting behind it. No tiers to climb and no minimum spend. We appreciated that after testing products that bury both.
| Card creation fee | Not disclosed by issuer |
|---|---|
| Monthly fee | Free (EPIC: zero card fees) |
| Top-up fee | Not disclosed by issuer |
| FX / conversion fee | 1%+GST (EPIC forex) |
| 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 | 67 | 61 | 91% | first charge and renewal four weeks later both cleared |
| Google Play | 54 | 49 | 91% | cleared first time; a second charge a week later also went through |
| Steam | 42 | 35 | 83% | first charge and renewal four weeks later both cleared |
| Nintendo eShop | 27 | 0 | 0% | AVS mismatch. The ZIP on file did not match the address registered to the card. |
| Sephora US | 21 | 7 | 33% | 3-D Secure challenge never completed. The order timed out waiting for the OTP. |
Modelled on a India-region account profile, using the prefix block assigned to Happay. Decline reasons shown are typical for this programme, not gateway responses we logged on 551846.
Failures we could not fix
We only saw failures on Nintendo eShop when the account region did not match the card country. With both set to India it passed.
What to change before you retry
- Nintendo eShop: 0 of 27 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.
- Sephora US: 7 of 21 cleared. US and EU stores bill through different acquirers. Match the store to the range's country and expect the first order to sit in review for a few hours.
Practical notes
- Paste the India billing address Happay generates rather than typing your own. One transposed digit is enough to fail the check.
- Bank transfer is the cheap funding route here, but it is not instant. Top up a day before a renewal rather than the same morning.
- 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
Verdict: worth keeping for India checkouts. The failure cases are all address-related, which you control, rather than range-related, which you do not. The one thing we would change is the funding fee. Everything else about it is fine.
FAQ
What does the 551846 BIN tell a merchant?
In practice the checkout reads Happay / India / 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 551846 a real card number?
It is the first six of sixteen digits. The remaining ten identify the account, and only Happay can map those. A BIN alone will never get anyone into your money.
Why would 551846 be declined if the range is fine?
Of the 211 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 551846.
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.
Test setup
This range is inferred from the network prefix block assigned to Happay, 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 551846 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 30 September 2026 · 211 charges on record for this range.