Glossary
The vocabulary of buying gift cards with crypto, defined plainly. Several of these — card draining, region locks, BIN blocks — are things worth understanding before you spend money at any shop, including this one.
- Card draining
Card draining is when a gift card code is sold to a buyer and then redeemed by the seller before the buyer can use it, leaving an empty card.
It is the single most important fraud to understand in this category, because the buyer discovers it only at redemption, and the reseller may not know either. Mitigations are structural rather than clever: buy from sellers with a real entity and recourse, prefer fast delivery so the window is short, and be suspicious of prices well below face value.
- Region lock
A region lock ties a gift card to one storefront and currency, so a code issued for one country will not redeem on another country's version of the same service.
It is enforced by the issuing vendor, not by the reseller, and it usually cannot be appealed. An Amazon US code fails on amazon.de; a US PSN code fails on a European account; a US Netflix code fails on an account billed anywhere else. This is the most common reason a perfectly valid code gets rejected.
- BIN
The BIN is the first six to eight digits of a card number, identifying the issuing bank and the card type — including whether it is prepaid, virtual or a standard credit card.
Merchants use it to apply rules before a charge is even attempted. This is why a funded prepaid card can be refused instantly at a subscription checkout: the BIN range is blocked as a fraud control, and no amount of balance changes the outcome.
- Domestic-scheme card
A domestic-scheme card works on a national payment network only, even when it carries an international brand mark, so it fails on foreign checkouts regardless of balance.
Many cards issued in North Africa, West Africa and South Asia fall into this category. They function normally in shops and on local sites, which is what makes the failure so confusing when an international checkout rejects them. No setting fixes it — the card is simply not on the international rails.
- TRC-20 and ERC-20
TRC-20 and ERC-20 are two networks that carry the same USDT token. TRC-20 runs on Tron with very low transfer costs; ERC-20 runs on Ethereum where fees rise with demand.
The token is identical; the road it travels is not. Sending to an address on the wrong network is the one genuinely unrecoverable mistake in crypto payments, so the network shown on an invoice and the network selected in your wallet must match.
- Fixed-rate invoice
A fixed-rate invoice locks the crypto amount at the moment it is generated, so the figure you owe cannot move while your transaction confirms.
Without it, a price swing between opening an invoice and the payment confirming can leave you underpaid through no fault of your own. Every invoice on this site is fixed-rate for the window shown on the payment page.
- Partial payment
A partial payment is when the amount received is less than the invoice total — most often because an exchange deducted its withdrawal fee from the amount sent rather than adding it on top.
It is common and it is not a failure. Here it routes the order into a manual review queue rather than rejecting it, and a person either completes the order or refunds in full. Adding one or two dollars of headroom when withdrawing avoids it entirely.
- Gift subscription
A gift subscription is an official product sold by a vendor that adds a paid term to someone else's existing account, redeemed by them, on their own login.
It is the cleanest possible supply route for a reseller because nothing unofficial happens: the real product is bought at list price and the recipient redeems it themselves. Where a vendor offers one, we use it. Where they do not, we use a prepaid voucher instead.
- Prepaid voucher
A prepaid voucher is a payment instrument you enter on the vendor's own checkout, used where the vendor has no gift-subscription product of its own.
The subscription is created on your account, by you, and the seller never touches your login. The risk to understand is that some vendors refuse certain prepaid BINs — which is why the route has to be tested before a product is listed, not after a customer complains.
- Chargeback
A chargeback is a card-network mechanism for reversing a payment. Cryptocurrency has no equivalent — once a transaction confirms it is final.
This is the trade you accept when paying in crypto, and it is why the seller's written refund policy and reputation are the only protection you have. Read both before paying, at any shop, including this one.
- IPN
An IPN, or instant payment notification, is the signed message a crypto payment processor sends a merchant when a payment's status changes.
It is how an order moves from pending to paid without anyone watching a screen. A correctly built store verifies the signature before acting on it and treats repeats as duplicates, so a replayed or forged notification cannot deliver a code or move an order backwards.
- Service fee
The service fee is the reseller's margin: the amount added to a product's face or list price in exchange for sourcing and delivering it.
Most crypto gift-card stores bury it in an exchange rate you cannot verify. Publishing it as a line item is unusual, costs nothing to do, and is the fastest way to tell whether a shop is comfortable with you doing the arithmetic. Ours is 9% on retail cards and 18% on AI subscriptions.
Where to go next
Why your card was declined · All guides · How to judge a shop like ours