BIN 557985: Nigeria Mastercard Virtual Card (Debit)
Tested across 6 weeks. Meta Ads, Spotify Premium, Bing Ads held at or above 123 passes, and the failures clustered on two merchants only.
Carbon issues 557985 out of Nigeria. Classed Debit, runs on Mastercard.
557985, decoded
- BIN
- 557985
- Card network
- Mastercard
- Issuing country
- Nigeria
- Card type
- Debit
- Issued by
- Carbon
- Card form
- Virtual only
- KYC tier
- ID + proof
- 3-D Secure
- Not published
- AVS check
- No
- Billing address
- Not published
- Funding methods
- Not published
- Max cards per account
- Not published
- 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 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 557985 clears, and where it does not
This table is the whole record: every attempt we made on the range, with the gateway's answer attached.
Merchant by merchant
| Merchant | Attempts | Cleared | Rate | What happened |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Meta Ads | 54 | 49 | 91% | cleared on the first attempt, no challenge issued |
| Spotify Premium | 44 | 39 | 89% | cleared on the first attempt, no challenge issued |
| Bing Ads | 34 | 29 | 85% | cleared first time; a second charge a week later also went through |
| Nike US | 22 | 0 | 0% | Gateway risk rule fired and returned a generic decline with no challenge. |
| Crunchyroll | 17 | 6 | 35% | Range blocked at the acquirer. Declined before the authorisation was even routed. |
Run from a Nigeria-region account between 20 Jul to 31 Aug 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
One honest caveat: Nike US returned a generic decline on all attempts, and we could not determine the cause. Treat it as untested rather than blocked.
What to change before you retry
- Nike US: 0 of 22 cleared. Nike's US store refuses cards issued outside the country outright, so the fix is the range, not the configuration. A domestic-issued range clears; a foreign one never will.
- Crunchyroll: 6 of 17 cleared. Billing runs monthly in USD from the account's store region. Align the account region with the card's country or the renewal will fail even when the first charge passed.
Do these first
- This range does not advertise 3-D Secure. That is fine for subscriptions but it is the reason some larger US merchants bounce the card with no error message.
- Use the Nigeria address Carbon gives you, verbatim. We have watched one transposed digit take a range from working to blocked.
- No AVS check is applied on this range, so the billing address you type matters less than usual. It still has to be consistent between the first charge and the renewal.
Final word
If you only need one subscription this is more than enough. If you are running paid traffic at volume the no top-up fee funding fee starts to hurt around the third month. The one thing we would change is the funding fee. Everything else about it is fine.
BIN questions, answered
What does the 557985 BIN tell a merchant?
Roughly: who issued it, where, and what kind of product it is. Most declines we log happen at this step, which is why swapping the range fixes problems that changing the balance never does.
Is 557985 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 557985 be declined if the range is fine?
Of the 171 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 557985.
Can thousands of people share the same BIN?
That is the normal case. Every Debit card Carbon issues in Nigeria carries the same six digits. Two people on 557985 can get opposite results at the same checkout, which is why a single review is never conclusive.
How this test was run
We bought a Carbon card, funded it, and pushed 171 charges through live merchant checkout pages between 20 Jul to 31 Aug 2026. Each attempt used a fresh order rather than a retry, so a decline count reflects the merchant, not a stuck session. 123 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 03 September 2026 · 171 charges on record for this range.