The hi card is a virtual Mastercard inside a crypto app, not a bank account, and its complaint history is the loudest thing about it.

Updated October 2026

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Available in US

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If you are reading this, you are probably in an awkward position. A normal bank card did not work out — a rejected application, a closed account, a country your bank will not touch, a payroll account that is not in your name. So you are looking at the crypto card shelf, and hi is one of the names there. That is a real search, and this page is written for it.

Here is the short version before the detail. The hi card is a virtual debit card that lives inside the hi app and spends from your hi account. It is not a bank account, it is not a bank, and the card’s own public pages say remarkably little about who can get one, what it costs, or what happens when something goes wrong. What is loud is the complaint record: a Trustpilot score of 1.8 out of 5 from 587 reviews, with users describing withdrawal problems, blocked cards, and losses on the HI token.

My score for the card is 4.9 out of 10. The conditions described here are current as of October 28, 2026.

Will they give you the card?

Scorecard

Who this suits, and who it does not

It might suit you if you are already a hi app member in Europe, you hold crypto at hi, and you want to spend that balance from a virtual Mastercard without converting it to your bank first. In that specific case the card does a narrow job. The existing member angle matters: this is a feature inside an app you have already joined and verified, not a standalone financial product you shop for from scratch.

It probably does not suit you if you need a physical card, if you need to be sure what you are paying in fees before you commit, if you rely on cash machines, if your country is not clearly supported, or — most of all — if you are considering it as a *safer* or more anonymous alternative to a blocked bank. It is not one. It is a payment card fronted by a crypto platform, with a complaint record to match.

The honest answer is: the official page does not say. The starting data records the market as the EEA, and that is as far as the card’s own pages go on this point.

What unofficial sources add is a historical picture. At launch in 2022, per Mastercard and press coverage of the time, the card was offered to members in more than 25 EEA countries and the UK. Later, Trustpilot reviewers report UK members being pushed out — told to withdraw by January, according to user reports from December 2023. That means the country list you may have read in a 2022 article is probably out of date, and reading it as current would be a mistake.

That is the practical problem. There is no published list of eligible countries today, so you cannot check from the outside whether you qualify. The honest way to find out is to have the hi app in front of you and see whether the Card section appears for your account. If you are reading this hoping for a yes or no, the card itself is the only source — and I would rather tell you that than guess.

Two more things worth knowing before you try. The card is tied to your personal IBAN currency, EUR or GBP — so it is fundamentally a euro- or pound-facing instrument, not a general multi-currency card. And the identity side of the sign-up is where the silence starts, which is the next section.

How to get it

There is one official step described, and it is smaller than you might expect: once your address has been verified, you can activate the card, and activation happens in the app’s Card section. That is the whole published process.

What is *not* stated: required documents, minimum age, the identity verification level, and which help-centre articles apply. The help centre does contain an “Identity verification (KYC)” collection, but that material was not opened for this review, so I will not paraphrase it from its title. If you need to know exactly what document is accepted, you need to read that collection yourself or ask hi directly.

That absence matters more than it sounds. KYC is not a formality here, and the reasons are structural rather than bureaucratic. Under EU anti-money-laundering rules, regulated firms must verify identity, screen for sanctions, understand the purpose of the relationship, and check whether you are a politically exposed person. If due diligence cannot be completed, the institution is required to hold back or refuse the relationship — which is why accounts get frozen pending documents rather than politely declined. Nationality is screened separately from residence, because sanctions lists and issuer risk policy are applied to citizenship and country of birth as well as to your address. Cards of this type are generally adult-only.

So expect a check. Do not expect a card to appear without one. And do not treat any workaround as a legitimate alternative — the rules here exist because of sanctions obligations, not as paperwork someone can talk their way past.

Fees: what it really costs

Here is the blunt finding: the card does not publish its fees. Not on the card page, not in the figures available to this review. Issuance, monthly, conversion, foreign-exchange and cash-machine charges are all listed as not stated.

What unofficial write-ups describe is a genuinely attractive-sounding arrangement: no transaction fees, no FX fees, no issuance fee, and issuance free for eligible users who complete KYC — with the important rider that fees may apply later. One of these write-ups is a blog review of the ueex site and it is undated, which is exactly the sort of source that ages badly.

The practical consequence: you are being asked to accept a pricing promise that the provider itself has not put in writing on the page. For someone who is already inside the app, already familiar with the interface, and spending small amounts, that might be a reasonable bet. For someone whose entire reason for being here is that their other options collapsed, betting on undisclosed terms is a poor trade.

What the card’s public pages say

Two small positives are real, though. First, the currency line is not a maybe: EUR or GBP, whichever your IBAN is denominated in. Second, if your balance runs out mid-life, the card’s own guidance is straightforward — top up, or switch to another secondary currency.

Three everyday payments, and what applies

To make the gaps concrete, let us walk through ordinary purchases rather than abstract fee rows.

A coffee in a country where you hold euros. The card is a Mastercard debit card, accepted where Mastercard is accepted — the card cites more than 90 million merchants. In principle the simplest possible transaction: euro balance, euro merchant, no conversion involved. Whether the *provider* takes a cut is precisely what is not stated. This is the case where an undisclosed fee would hurt you least.

A subscription billed in dollars. Here a conversion happens, and the conversion rate and the FX fee are both unpublished. This is the purchase that exposes you. In the crypto card category as a whole, the usual pattern is a spread taken at conversion plus a separate percentage on foreign currency — but hi does not publish its figures, so you would be discovering your cost at the till rather than beforehand. If a recurring dollar subscription is part of why you want a card, treat that as a question to ask hi in writing before you rely on it.

Anything you would want to dispute later. Charges, duplicate billing, goods not received. A chargeback is a refund ordered by the issuer, with reason codes for fraud, duplicates and non-delivery. But prepaid-card coverage varies by jurisdiction and should not be assumed, and hi’s dispute process is not stated on its public pages. If you are spending money you cannot afford to lose, that silence is not a detail.

One structural risk applies to any purchase: a declined authorisation can leave a hold on your funds that stays for days, in practice up to about a week. A declined hotel booking can therefore freeze money you thought you had. Budget for that, not as a fee, but as a possibility.

Top up: where the money comes from

The card is linked by default to your personal IBAN currency, EUR or GBP. Transactions are covered by funds in that IBAN. That is the plain path and, if your account is in euros or pounds and functioning, it is the least surprising thing about the whole product.

There is a second path, and it is the one that makes hi a crypto card rather than just a spending card: you can also pay with crypto held at hi, with one secondary currency at a time, set in the app under secondary payment currency. Not several at once — one. If that secondary balance runs dry, the card falls back to the IBAN or you switch it.

Here the card goes quiet on the details that decide whether it works. Which coins and which networks are not stated. That omission is not pedantry. Sending on a network the provider does not support, or to an address belonging to a different network, can simply lose the funds — blockchain transfers are irreversible, and recovery then depends on manual support with no guarantee. If you were hoping to fund the card by sending USDT over Tron, for example, you cannot confirm from the card’s pages that this is possible, and the general risk of getting the network wrong is one of the better-documented hazards in this whole category.

Deposits into an IBAN currency also do not happen instantly in most systems, and hi’s top-up times are not stated. Withdrawals are not stated either, which matters more than usual given what users report.

Let me put that last point plainly, because it is the single most important sentence in this section: the how-to-top-up, how-long-it-takes and how-to-withdraw information is not on the public pages. If cashing out is part of your plan — and for many people in an awkward banking position, it is the whole plan — you are planning around a blank.

For orientation, this is how funding works in this category generally. Deposit methods at comparable cards tend to be bank transfer, card, and stablecoin transfer into a denominated account. Network fees for a crypto deposit are charged by the blockchain, not by the card provider, so a cheap transfer on one network and an expensive one on another can differ a lot. And the stablecoins involved are not risk-free: they aim to hold a stable value but are not always stable — TerraUSD collapsed in May 2023’s market turmoil and USDC briefly lost its peg in March 2023. A stablecoin deposit is a bet that the token stays near a dollar while it sits in your account.

Paying with it every day

The honest summary is: virtual card, narrow reach, no confirmed mobile wallets.

The card page announces that virtual debit cards are “now available” — a help article dated 30 June 2026 uses exactly that phrasing, so virtual availability is the current, confirmed state of the product. A physical card is not mentioned on that page. For some readers that ends the conversation immediately, and reasonably so.

Everywhere it works, it works widely: Mastercard acceptance, which the card puts at more than 90 million merchants. That is genuinely useful when it works. The problem is the gap between *accepted* and *reliable*, and that is where the substance of daily use lives.

Apple Pay and Google Pay are not officially named by the card. In practice, users report Google Pay not working — that appears in the complaint record alongside a card that was blocked for two months in August–September 2023. Tokenised mobile wallets are one of the standard safeguards in this category (a device-specific number replaces your card number, with a one-time security code per payment), and if you cannot confirm one works, you are left with typing card details into every checkout. On the app side, the hi app’s Card section is where the card lives; the store listing could not be identified, and store ratings are not stated.

Cash machines are not covered. Not a single figure. For anyone living somewhere cards are still the norm rather than a smartphone tap, that is disqualifying.

Two category mechanics are worth knowing, because they explain declines you may not have caused. Merchants can look up the issuing institution and country from the card’s first six or eight digits and may apply extra scrutiny if that differs from your billing address — which is why a card issued in one country looks “foreign” in another shop. Some merchants decline prepaid or foreign-issued cards for exactly that reason. Separately, address verification, which compares the numeric parts of the billing address you type against issuer records, is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards and can cause declines on their own.

Rewards are the one genuinely upbeat line, and it is vague. The page says users can earn crypto rewards with the card. No rates, no conditions. Unofficial launch coverage put it at 1–10% back depending on tier. Users report a cashback cut — for example from 8% to 1% in July 2023. Treat any percentage you read as historical, not as an offer.

What can go wrong

This is where the card’s thin documentation stops being an inconvenience and becomes the story.

The Trustpilot score is 1.8 out of 5, from 587 reviews, as of 21 October 2026, with one review in the last twelve months. That volume with that rating is not a few grumbles. The themes users report, in their own terms:

• Withdrawals and the UK exit. Withdrawal problems clustered in 2023–24, with UK members reportedly told to withdraw by January. A card being wound down for a country is a category hazard with real precedent — WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, which closed every WaveCrest-issued Visa programme; FTX’s US debit card was wound down after Visa terminated its global agreements in November 2022. Closures typically mean a notice period, then spending and loading stop, then you are asked to withdraw what remains.
• Rewards reduced. The cashback cut from 8% to 1% in July 2023, plus tier changes through 2022–23.
• Card blocked, wallet broken. Two months blocked, with Google Pay not working, August–September 2023.
• Losses on the HI token and fraud allegations. Users report losing value on HI and accuse the project of a rug pull, across 2023–25.

That last theme is the one to think hardest about, because it goes to the company’s own token rather than the card. Users bought in on a reward promise, and the reward was denominated in an asset that fell. If you are here because of the crypto side, you are exposed to something a bank card does not do: your incentive programme can be simultaneously a marketing cost centre and a source of your own losses.

Who is actually behind this? The official page is silent. The starting data names hi Technology Limited. Press coverage from 2022 names Moorwand Ltd as the card issuer and a Mastercard principal member, with a Contis partnership announced for the debit card and fiat accounts. Nobody has published that stack on the card’s own pages. This matters structurally, not for trivia: in this category the card network routes the payment, the licensed issuer holds the programme, and the crypto brand is often just a manager and a front end. If the programme is cancelled, you are dealing with an issuer’s wind-down while the brand that marketed it to you may already have moved on.

Security safeguards are not stated — no mention of two-factor authentication, instant freeze, spending limits or 3-D Secure. Those are the category’s typical protections, and I would expect them to exist, but I will not claim hi offers what I cannot see. Support is a help centre with a “Contact hi” collection, in English and French, with channels, hours and languages unconfirmed.

One last structural point, and it applies to every card in this category rather than to hi specifically: whoever holds your credentials holds your crypto. With a custodial wallet the provider keeps them, so you are trusting them completely. The seed phrase — typically 12 to 24 words — is the unencrypted private key, and anyone who gets it can restore the wallet and spend the funds. Transfers are irreversible and a stolen key has no recovery, because the network cannot freeze or return anything. The record of custodial failure is not theoretical: Mt. Gox (about US$350 million reported stolen, 2011–2014), Coincheck (about US$400 million, 2018), Ronin Network (US$625 million, 2022).

None of that means hi stole your money. It means that with a virtual card tied to a custodial crypto balance, you are combining cardholder risk with platform risk, and the complaints suggest the second has shown up in practice.

What to take instead

If the reason you are here is that ordinary banking failed, the honest advice is to widen the category rather than swap one crypto card for another. Here is what else is on the shelf, with their scores from the same exercise.

The strongest of the three on paper is the International Visa Card, mainly because it publishes its prices. $5 one-time issuance, no maintenance fee, USD spending free on all plans, and a stated foreign-currency cost of “Visa exchange rate + 2% FX fee”. Deposits are free. That is a number you can plan around, which is more than hi offers. Its catch is its own: it is not available to residents or legal registrants of a long list including Belarus, mainland China, North Korea, Cuba, India, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela and Vietnam, and purchases are blocked in North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Russia, Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela. FATF grey-list countries are reviewed case by case with compliance approval. The rule follows residence or registration, not citizenship.

If you are in one of those countries, that option is closed and the honest conclusion is that none of these four is a good answer. What works there is a regulated local institution you are eligible for, or a regulated service in a country you legitimately have a lawful connection to — with a local address, local identification and a real account behind it. The alternative that fails is a card obtained through someone else’s address or documents, and I will not help with that, because the KYC is not the obstacle to be removed.

The UNi Card sits in the middle: no annual fee, no FX fee, conversion at live over-the-counter rates with “no hidden exchange fees” — a published commitment in the same category where hi publishes nothing. But its eligibility and funding are also not stated, so you would be making the same verification call you would with hi, just with better fee disclosure.

Whop Cards disclose almost nothing either (“no extra fees” with no amounts), are limited to 31 U.S. states for consumers and 41 for businesses, and exclude unsupported consumer countries including Russia and Belarus among others. The basis — citizenship or residence — is not stated. Its funding model also deserves attention: spending draws on a Whop balance, pending balance usable as soon as a payment arrives, backed by stablecoin collateral from a linked wallet, with coins and networks not named. Using money that has not settled yet is a comfortable arrangement until it is examined.

Who I would recommend it to

Three groups, in descending order of how comfortable I am.

Existing hi app members in Europe who pay from their IBAN and hold crypto they already want to spend. If that is you, the card does one narrow thing inside an account you already have, in a currency your bank already uses. Try it with small amounts you would not mind losing.

Existing members who mostly want the crypto rewards — with eyes open. The rewards line is published without rates, the unofficial figures ranged from 1% to 10% depending on tier, and users report a cut from 8% to 1% in July 2023. Understand this as a variable, not a benefit, and remember the reward is paid in HI.

Nobody else. Not as a first card, not as a backup you have not tested, and above all not as a way around a banking refusal.

Two checks before you commit, in this order. Ask hi, in writing, what it currently charges on issuance, conversion and foreign currency, and what the limits are — the answer is the whole decision, and a written answer is worth more than this page. Then find out what happens if you need your money out: withdrawal times, fees, and what the process looks like after a card programme is closed. That second question is the one that shows up most often in the complaints, and it is the one nobody is answering on the public pages.

And if you take one thing from this review: the card’s own documentation does not tell you what it costs, where it works, or how to get your money back. That is not a small gap. For a product you are considering because your other options failed, undocumented terms and a 1.8 complaint score are the substance of the decision, not a footnote to it.

Frequently asked questions

What is the hi card?

The hi card is a virtual debit Mastercard issued inside the hi crypto app, spending from your hi account. It is linked by default to your personal IBAN currency, EUR or GBP, so it draws on bank funds, and it can also pay from crypto held at hi in one secondary currency at a time. It is a payment card with a crypto platform attached, not a bank account or a bank.

How does hi card work?

You activate it in the app’s Card section once your address has been verified, then pay anywhere Mastercard is accepted — the card cites more than 90 million merchants. Transactions are covered by your IBAN funds, or by crypto balance at hi if you have set a secondary payment currency. If a balance runs out you top up or switch the secondary currency.

Is hi a bank?

No, and the card never claims to be one. This is the important distinction for anyone reading reviews: the brand markets the card, a licensed issuer holds the card programme, and Mastercard routes the payments. Press from 2022 names Moorwand Ltd as issuer and hi Technology Limited as the company behind the brand, but the official pages say neither.

How do I get the hi card?

You need the hi app and an account there. The only published step is that once your address is verified you can activate the card in the app’s Card section. Required documents, minimum age and identity verification level are not stated on the public pages, so you will need to check the app’s identity verification section yourself.

Does hi card require KYC?

In practice, yes — the address verification step is part of activation, and any regulated provider in this category must verify identity, screen for sanctions and assess risk under anti-money-laundering law. EU rules also require a politically-exposed-person check and cover nationality separately from residence. There is no legitimate route around this, and I would treat anyone offering one as a warning sign.

How much does the hi card cost?

The official pages do not state issuance, monthly, transaction, conversion or FX fees, or any daily or monthly limits. Unofficial reviews describe no transaction, FX or issuance fees, with issuance free for eligible users who complete KYC — but also say fees may apply later. Treat the free version as a historical claim, not a published price.

How do I add the hi card to Apple Wallet or Google Pay?

I cannot confirm that you can. Neither Apple Pay nor Google Pay is officially named by the card, and users report Google Pay not working alongside a card that was blocked for two months in August–September 2023. If a phone wallet is essential to how you would use the card, test it early and in small amounts.

Is hi card safe?

I would not call it safe, and I will not promise anyone that it is. A virtual card means your card details exist in an app, and the card’s own pages state no security safeguards — two-factor authentication, instant freeze, spending limits, 3-D Secure — all unconfirmed. The Trustpilot score is 1.8 from 587 reviews, with users reporting blocked cards, withdrawal problems and losses on the HI token. Read §What can go wrong before deciding.

Where can I use the card, and is it available in my country?

The card works wherever Mastercard is accepted, and that part is broad. Eligibility by country is the problem: official pages name no countries, and unofficial accounts say launch coverage was 25+ EEA countries plus the UK, with UK members later pushed out and told to withdraw. Ask hi directly, and do not rely on a 2022 article’s country list.

Can I withdraw money from the hi card?

Withdrawal terms are not stated on the public pages — not the method, not the time, not the fee. That matters enormously given user reports of withdrawal problems during the UK exit in 2023–24. If being able to get your money out is part of why you want a card, ask hi in writing before you put anything in.

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