A euro IBAN, a Mastercard and a lot of unanswered complaints

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

Blackcatcard is a Malta-based e-money business selling two things at once: a euro IBAN you can receive a salary or a payment into, and a Mastercard that spends whatever balance sits in that account. The account opens free, the first card is free, and on paper the everyday fees look thin. What the card’s public pages do not tell you is the price of turning crypto into euros, and what its users report is that payments and withdrawals get stopped after the money arrives. I went through the card’s own pages, then read the complaint record carefully, and this is what I found. My score: 4.3 out of 10. The conditions described here are current as of October 28, 2026.

The short version: the product is well built for its stated purpose and badly served when something goes wrong. If you are an EEA resident who wants a euro IBAN plus a prepaid Mastercard and you are comfortable treating the provider as your bank, the mechanics work. If you are anywhere else, the card itself is stated as an EEA card and the crypto side is where the real questions are. And if you are choosing on the strength of reviews rather than features, the reviews are the story.

Who gets the card, and who does not

The card’s own pages split this into two different answers, and the difference matters more than it first looks.

• The account is described as available “straight after the successful registration”, with no country list on the site, and the card’s own file says the account is global and for people aged 16+.
• The card is described as being for EEA residents. Business accounts are said to be available “from most jurisdictions”.

So the honest reading is: an account, yes, apparently nearly anywhere. A card, apparently only if you live in the European Economic Area. If you are in, say, the UK, the US, Nigeria or Brazil, the euro IBAN may well be yours while the plastic is not — and the public pages I read do not resolve how the split works in practice, or what happens if you open an account and then find out the card is not available to you. That is the first thing to check before you register, and it is worth an email to support rather than a guess.

Two more things the pages leave open. There is no country list on the site at all, which for a financial product is a real gap: you cannot tell from the marketing pages which countries the business actually onboards. And the card’s own file describes the account as global from 16+, which is a lower age than you would meet almost anywhere else — but that file is not the customer-facing page, and the two do not fully agree.

If you are reading this because a bank refused you a card, or because your country has no easy access to mainstream banking, then the appeal of this offer is obvious and worth taking seriously. It just does not survive contact with the country rules, and the pages do not promise it will.

Getting the card: what happens at signup

The signup story is short and mostly favourable. The account and the first card are free, and the card is a Mastercard — the card file refers to a “Free Mastercard”. A virtual card is issued instantly, which means you have something usable in minutes rather than days, and that is the single most convenient feature in the whole product.

The physical card is a separate matter. Regular mail is free and takes 15–20 business days. Express delivery takes 1–5 business days and the fee is calculated individually, so you will not find a number for it. Reissuing a lost or damaged card costs €7, or €12 if you want a nickname printed on it — and the card’s own pages give two different tables for this, which tells you the pricing here is not fully settled.

What the pages do not say is what identity checks involve. KYC is not stated on the pages I read, and neither are any verification tiers. This is not an accusation — plenty of regulated firms run a verification flow and simply do not publish its shape. But you should assume there is some, because EU anti-money-laundering rules require it: name, address, date of birth, nationality, identity documentation, a sanctions check, and a determination of whether you are a politically exposed person. If that due diligence cannot be completed, EU rules require the firm to hold back the transaction or, where needed, end the relationship. That is the ordinary mechanism behind most of the complaints I describe later, and it is worth understanding before you are surprised by it.

Fees: what the card costs day to day

Here is the honest picture, and it has a hole in the middle. The card’s own pages are careful to describe conversion as offering the “lowest fees on the market” without printing a single number. That is a marketing sentence, not a figure.

Two everyday payments, so you can feel what this means.

Coffee at a local café in Lisbon, paid with a card. This is the card at its best — a euro card, a euro account, a domestic merchant. The only cost is whatever the merchant charges, as long as it is within the free allowance. If you are outside the EU, a 1% fee applies (minimum €1.50).

A €30 online subscription billed in dollars, from anywhere. The dollar amount is converted at some rate, and the rate plus the conversion fee are both unstated. If the network’s own rate is used plus a hidden spread, you could be paying a percentage you cannot calculate in advance. This is where the missing figure bites: the card’s headline cost of “free” says nothing about the one number a non-euro spender cares about.

A €180 withdrawal from a cash machine in Lisbon, having already used €120 of the free allowance. The free €200 monthly allowance is gone, so 1% applies — about €1.80 on top of whatever the ATM operator charges. Pull €600 in one month and you are at the allowance’s edge, and the €5,000 daily and €10,000 monthly limits are the ceiling you cannot spend past.

Two more costs that catch people out. The dormancy fee of €15 a month from the seventh month of inactivity is the single largest recurring number on this list, and it is aimed squarely at an account someone opens, forgets, and then finds drained. And closed accounts still holding funds are listed at €50 a month, which reads as a closing fee for balances you failed to withdraw.

There are no loyalty tiers on the card — not stated, and the loyalty programme is run by Baltic Technology Solutions OÜ, a separate company. So there is nothing to climb into a cheaper tier.

Top up: how money gets onto the card

There are three routes, and one of them is where you must slow down.

Buying crypto with euros inside the app. The card’s file names the partner as Manerio UAB. You buy BTC, ETH or USDT with euros through this integrated service, with a minimum purchase of 5 EUR. The crypto conversion fee is not stated, which is a problem: if this is your main way of funding, the price of the crypto itself is only half the cost.

SEPA transfer into the account. Free, no amount limit. This is the cleanest route if you have euro income.

Internal transfers. Free, no limit.

And here is the trap that catches people out. The card’s pages do not name the networks on which BTC, ETH or USDT are accepted. That is not a technicality. Blockchain transfers are irreversible: a deposit sent on a network the provider does not support, or to an address belonging to a different network, can be lost or need manual support recovery with no guarantee of success. USDT alone has been issued on networks including Ethereum, Tron, Solana, Polygon and Avalanche. If you pick wrong, there is no chargeback to fall back on.

If you intend to fund in crypto, ask support which networks are supported and get the answer in writing before your first transfer. And note the separate fee for funding *the card* rather than the account: card top-up and card transfers are 3%. So loading the IBAN can be free while loading the card carries a charge — those are two different operations with two different prices, and the distinction is easy to miss.

Getting money back out: SEPA out is five transfers free per month, then €0.20 each. Crypto withdrawal fees are not stated.

Paying with it every day

Virtual card instantly, Mastercard, euro account — the mechanics of daily spending are the strongest part of this product.

• Instant virtual card, so you can pay online minutes after registering
• Mastercard, accepted wherever Mastercard is taken
• Cash machine free to €200 a month inside the EU, then 1%; outside the EU 1% with a €1.50 minimum
• Cash limits €5,000 a day and €10,000 a month
• “24/7 live customer support” via chat, and PIN recovery through that same in-app support
• Rewards advertised as “up to 5% cashback”, an “up to 4% p.a. reward”, and 2% cashback on Amazon

Three caveats on that last line. The currency in which the cashback is paid is not stated, nor are the conditions — what you have to spend, on what, to earn it. “Up to” is doing a lot of work in those numbers, and I would not count them in a budget.

Apple Pay and Google Pay are not disclosed. The card has an iOS app, “Blackcatcard — My prepaid card” (id1449352913), and I did not read its rating. Mobile wallet support is the thing that decides whether a card feels daily-usable, and this card will not tell you.

Where you can use it is also unstated — there is no country list for spending. Some merchants refuse prepaid cards or cards issued in a country different from the billing address, because the card’s identification numbers reveal the issuer and country. So a decline in some shops is a property of the card type, not evidence that something is wrong with you.

Disputes have a price. A “transaction claim without grounds” costs €10, and no time frames are stated. So before you file anything, work out whether you actually have grounds — the express-lane claim is not free.

What can go wrong

This is the part I would read twice.

The company. Papaya Ltd., 31 Sliema Road, Gzira GZR 1637, Malta. It is an Electronic Money Institution authorised and regulated by the Malta Financial Services Authority, registration number C55146. Its funds are not covered by the Depositor Compensation Scheme — which is normal for e-money, since EU rules require safeguarded funds held separately or insured, not bank deposits, but it means your euro balance is not a bank deposit and you should treat it accordingly. The loyalty programme comes from Baltic Technology Solutions OÜ.

How your money is held. The arrangement is custodial: your funds sit in an e-money account, and private keys are protected by “a licensed institution”. Custodial means the provider holds the credentials, so you trust them completely — and there is a history here worth knowing. Mt. Gox lost about US$350 million as reported stolen between 2011 and 2014, Coincheck about US$400 million in 2018, Ronin Network US$625 million in 2022. None of that is this card, but all of it is the risk class you are entering.

The complaints. On Trustpilot, the card has a TrustScore of 1.9 out of 5 from 744 reviews, read on 21 October 2026, with 56% one-star. This is a user report, not an official incident record — I found no official incident notice from the company. The recurring themes:

• Payments and outgoing transfers declined or cancelled after money arrived, with reported examples on 8 May, 27 Jun, 28 Jul, 4 Sep, 25 Sep and 2 Oct 2026
• Withdrawals suspended
• Account closures, and problems closing accounts
• Generic support replies that do not resolve the specific problem
• Scam allegations

I want to be careful here about what this does and does not mean. These are people reporting their own experiences on a public forum, and a low score is not proof of wrongdoing. But 744 reviews is not a handful of complainants either, and the specific pattern — funds received, then payments and withdrawals stopped — is the same story told repeatedly across six months. If that is your use case, that is the failure mode to plan around: the money arriving and then not moving.

Why this is not unusual. EU rules require institutions to stop a transaction or end a relationship when due diligence cannot be completed. Licences can be suspended, and card networks can and have terminated programmes: Visa ended its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022 and the FTX US debit card was wound down. WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all its programmes. Programme closures typically give notice, then stop spending and loading, then ask users to withdraw remaining balances.

The regulatory clock. The EU’s crypto-assets regulation, MiCA, took legal effect in June 2023. Its rules on stablecoins applied from 30 June 2024 and the remaining provisions, including the rules for crypto-asset service providers, from 30 December 2024. Under the transitional period, providers already operating under national law could continue only until 1 July 2026 or until they received or were refused authorisation, whichever came first. So a 2026 review is exactly when the question “is this provider properly authorised under MiCA?” stops being academic — and ESMA maintains a public interim register of authorised providers that you can check.

Two more structural risks. Blockchain transfers are irreversible, so a wrong-network deposit may be gone. And stablecoins can depeg: TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022, USDC briefly lost its peg in March 2023 during the US banking crisis. If your balance is a stablecoin and the peg moves, your card balance moves with it.

What to take instead

I am not going to pretend the alternatives are perfect — each of these has its own gaps. Here is how they line up.

International Visa Card is the one with the clearest published costs and a real FX number, which makes it easier to reason about than a card that says “lowest fees” and prints nothing. It blocks residents and registrants of seventeen named countries — Belarus, mainland China, North Korea, Cuba, India, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela and Vietnam — with FATF grey-list countries reviewed case by case. Crucially, the rule is by residence or registration, not citizenship, and purchases are blocked outright in seven of those countries. The physical card is “coming soon”.

UNi Card has the cleanest fee statement of the three: no annual fee, no foreign transaction fee, assets converted at live over-the-counter rates, and it says “no hidden exchange fees” — which is at least a stated commitment, though “live OTC rates” is still not the same as a fixed number you can plan against. It pays up to 3% in spend-to-earn rewards. Who can get one is not stated, which is its weakness.

Whop Cards is the most restricted and the least documented. 31 US states for consumers, 41 for businesses, with unsupported consumer countries including Belarus, mainland China, Cuba, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela and Vietnam. It spends from a Whop balance — pending balance is usable as soon as a payment arrives — and is backed by stablecoin collateral from a linked wallet, though which coins and networks is not stated. Its 5% cashback is at select merchants, currently Uber, with payout currency and conditions unstated. If you are outside the US, this one is not for you.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend Blackcatcard to an EEA resident who wants a euro IBAN and a Mastercard, is comfortable that their balance is e-money rather than a bank deposit, can pay in euros most of the time, and treats the advertised cashback as a rounding error rather than a plan. Someone who wants the account open today and a virtual card usable within minutes, and who will check the app’s rating and the Apple Pay question themselves because the pages will not answer them.

I would not recommend it to anyone whose money has to move reliably under pressure — which is precisely what the reviews say is hard. Anyone whose spending is mostly in dollars, pounds or any non-euro currency, because the conversion fee and the FX fee are both unstated and that is the number you need. Anyone choosing on reputation rather than features, because 744 reviews at 1.9 out of 5 is not a rounding error either. And anyone in a high-sanction-risk relationship with the EU, who should not read “account globally available” as permission.

If it is you in that second group, my honest advice is to open an ordinary bank account and treat crypto cards as a side experiment with money you can afford to have blocked.

Frequently asked questions

What is Blackcatcard card?

Blackcatcard is an electronic money service from Papaya Ltd. in Malta, offering a euro account with an IBAN, a virtual Mastercard issued instantly, and a physical card by post. You can hold euros, receive SEPA transfers, and buy BTC, ETH or USDT with euros. It is an e-money institution, not a bank, so your balance is not covered by the Depositor Compensation Scheme.

Is Blackcatcard a bank?

No — it is an electronic money institution authorised and regulated by the Malta Financial Services Authority, registration number C55146. An EMI can issue e-money, payment cards and wallets but cannot lend. Its customer funds are safeguarded under EU rules but are not bank deposits, so deposit guarantee schemes do not apply to your balance.

Who owns Blackcatcard?

Papaya Ltd., 31 Sliema Road, Gzira GZR 1637, Malta, is the licensed company behind the card. The loyalty programme is operated by Baltic Technology Solutions OÜ, a separate Estonian company, and the integrated crypto service is described as run with partner Manerio UAB. So several companies are involved, and only one of them is your regulated counterparty.

Is the Blackcatcard card available in my country?

The euro account is described as available straight after successful registration, globally, from age 16, with no country list published on the site. The card itself is described as being for EEA residents. The rule is not published as citizenship versus residence, so if you are outside the EEA, check with support before registering — you may get the account and not the card.

How do I get a Blackcatcard card?

Registration opens the euro account, and a virtual Mastercard is issued instantly, which means you can pay online within minutes. The physical card is free by regular mail in 15–20 business days, or 1–5 business days by express with a fee calculated individually. Reissuing a card costs €7, or €12 with a nickname, though the card’s pages show two different tables for this.

Does Blackcatcard require KYC?

The pages I read do not state what checks are required. EU rules do require customer due diligence — name, address, date of birth, nationality, identity documents, a sanctions check and politically exposed person screening. If that cannot be completed, the firm must hold back the transaction or end the relationship, which is the ordinary reason accounts get frozen.

How do I top up the Blackcatcard card?

Three routes: buy BTC, ETH or USDT with euros through the integrated service with a 5 EUR minimum; send SEPA into the account free with no limit; or make an internal transfer, also free. Funding the card itself rather than the account costs 3%. Critically, the networks supported are not stated, and a transfer on the wrong network can be lost.

Is the Blackcatcard card free?

Opening the account and the first card are free, and one card carries no monthly fee. But a crypto conversion fee and a foreign exchange fee are both unstated, the card says only that it has the “lowest fees on the market”. Inactivity costs €15 a month from the seventh month, and a closed account still holding funds is listed at €50 a month.

Can I use the Blackcatcard card in Apple Wallet?

Apple Pay support is not disclosed on the card’s pages, and neither is Google Pay. The card does have an iOS app, “Blackcatcard — My prepaid card”, and PIN recovery runs through 24/7 in-app chat support. Since mobile wallet support is usually the deciding factor for daily use, this is the first thing to confirm yourself.

Is the Blackcatcard card safe?

Judge it on two separate questions. The licence is real: a Malta-registered EMI regulated by the MFSA, and virtual cards use tokenised numbers stored on the device. But funds are held custodially with no deposit guarantee, blockchain transfers are irreversible, and on Trustpilot the card scores 1.9 out of 5 from 744 reviews, with users reporting payments and withdrawals blocked after funding.

Content created by the «cryptocardadvisor» team