A virtual card that charges 2% on the cheapest plan and keeps your money in its own wallet
Available in US
LinkPay is not a bank account with a card attached. It is a custodial crypto wallet with virtual card numbers on top, sold in four subscription tiers, open to a long list of countries but barred from others, funded only by cryptocurrency, and — on its own pages — priced inconsistently enough that you should read the fees twice. That combination produces a card that works smoothly for a specific kind of user and is quietly wrong for everyone else.
Here is my honest read after working through the card’s own pages, its terms, its fees and its public complaints.
The conditions described here are current as of October 28, 2026.
Verdict: 5.0 out of 10
My score is 5.0 out of 10. That is not a rounding of something worse and not a hedge around something better. It is a card with good reach and a weak everyday product, sitting on top of a pricing page that contradicts its own terms of service.
Who it suits: non-Russian advertisers and agencies who need many virtual cards for ad platforms, and anyone whose alternative is no card at all. Who it does not suit: anyone paying rent, groceries or utilities from the main balance; anyone who needs a physical card; anyone who wants to hold their own keys.
| Criterion | Mark | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Who can get it | 9 / 10 | Unofficial sources say 168 countries available, 28 restricted; officially closed in 27 countries, and that list is explicitly not exhaustive |
| Cost | 3 / 10 | Lite is free, Plus 59 dollars a month, Pro 179, Ultra 209; a 2% payment fee on Lite with a 2-dollar minimum — and the site’s numbers clash with its terms |
| Top-up options | 7 / 10 | Crypto only, 7+ currencies; unofficial sources name BTC and USDT and mention the TRC20 and Bitcoin networks |
| Reliability and complaints | 3 / 10 | Issuer not named, MSB registration in Canada; complaints of frozen cards, withdrawals “processing” for four-plus weeks, Trustpilot at 2 out of 5 |
| Everyday use | 2 / 10 | Virtual cards only, no ATM, and Apple Pay and Google Pay are “coming soon” |
| Total | 5.0 / 10 | Strong on access, weak on the things you actually pay with a card for |
The single highest mark — access — is also the thing that misleads people fastest. Availability is not the same as usability, and a card you can open in almost any country but can only load with crypto and only spend from a virtual number is a narrower product than “168 countries” suggests.
Will they give you the card?
Short answer: probably, unless you live in one of the named countries — but the card’s own page on eligibility is the one piece of its site that does not spell the answer out, so read this as a summary of what is published rather than a guarantee.
The card links to a “Certain Countries” page that, as far as I could check, the public pages do not restate in the body. That detail is not stated on the main pages, so I cannot summarise it for you; go and read that page yourself before you commit.
What is stated is the exclusion list. The service is not provided in 27 listed countries, including the Russian Federation and Belarus, and also Hong Kong, the United States, Ukraine, Iran, Cuba, Syria and North Korea among others. The card says that list is not exhaustive, which is the phrase issuers use when the real list is longer than the printed one. The terms bar both residents and citizens of listed countries — citizenship, not just address. On top of that, US citizens, permanent residents and US entities cannot open accounts at all, whatever country they live in. If you are an American living in Lisbon, that rule follows you.
Unofficial figures, from a third-party review site rather than the card: 168 countries available and 28 restricted, with China appearing on the map but not in the body text; Russia recorded as restricted as of 11 August 2026. Treat those as directional. They come from someone else, the card has not confirmed them, and the card’s own “not exhaustive” wording already covers the difference.
One practical consequence: because citizenship is screened separately from residence, moving your address does not necessarily fix a refusal. That is how anti-money-laundering rules work in most jurisdictions — nationality and country of birth are recorded and checked in their own right.
How to get it
The short version: sign up, pick a plan, and upload documents at the verification level that matches the spending limit you need. There is no application form in the traditional sense and no branch to visit.
The card does not show its identity-check requirements on the pages I could read. It links to an Anti Money Laundering page whose content is not shown, so the KYC detail is not stated in the place you would expect it. What is stated is a three-tier verification ladder, and it is worth reading as a ladder rather than a menu, because each rung decides how much you can spend and which cards you can use.
No verification — 500 dollars a month, and advertising cards only. This is the “see if it works” tier: you can put a small amount in and test the product.
Basic — 2,000 dollars a month, all cards except Apple Pay and Google Pay, and it needs your full name, address and ID details.
Unlimited — no spend or card-type limits, and it needs a photo of a valid ID plus a live check.
Verification is usually completed within 24 hours but can take longer. Documents that fail automatic checking can be sent to manual review, and the official rejection reasons go no further than “valid documents with clear photos”, which is not much to argue with if your passport scan is rejected. In this category, that phrase covers everything from a glare on a photocopy to a genuinely expired document.
On the card itself: the page advertises a “Virtual card for all purchases” and does not offer a physical one. Third-party sources say the cards run on Visa or Mastercard networks; the card’s own pages do not name the network, and the currency is not stated either.
Fees: what it really costs
Here is where I have to slow you down, because LinkPay’s home page and its Terms of Service do not agree with each other on several of these lines. I am showing you both sets of numbers rather than picking the one that looks better.
| Fee or limit | Lite | Plus | Pro | Ultra |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly fee | free | $59/month | $179/month | $209/month |
| Free cards per month | 0 | 5 | 15 | 79 |
| Transaction fee (home page) | 2%, min $2 | 1.5%, min $1 | 1%, min $0 | 1%, min $0 |
| Transaction fee (terms) | 2%, min $2 | 1.5%, min $1 | 1% | 1% |
| Decline fee (home page) | 2% | 1.5% | 1% | 1% |
| Decline fee (terms) | 0.5% | 0.5% | 0.3% | free |
| Deposit fee (home page) | 1% | 0.75% | free | free |
| Deposit fee (terms) | 1% | 0.75% | 0.5% | free |
| Withdrawal fee (home page) | 3%, min $5 | 3%, min $5 | 2%, min $2 | 1%, min $1 |
| Withdrawal fee (terms) | free | free | free | free |
| Team members | 3 | 5 | 20 | 50 |
| Merchant accounts | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Ultra in the Terms of Service | — | — | — | $299/month, 100 free cards, cashback 3% capped at $299 per cycle |
Three of those lines differ between the two sources, and one whole plan is priced two ways: the home page says Ultra is 209 dollars a month with 79 free cards and 2% cashback, while the terms say 299 dollars with 100 free cards and 3% cashback capped at 299 dollars per billing cycle. That is not a rounding difference. If you are buying Ultra, ask support which number they will honour before you pay.
The per-card issue price on Lite is not stated, so on the free plan you cannot calculate what your second card costs. And cashback only exists on the two paid plans — 1% on Pro, 2% on Ultra on the home page — with the currency of payout not stated anywhere I could find.
Three everyday payments, and what they cost. Let me walk through what a real week looks like on each tier, because percentages hide very different amounts.
A 4-dollar coffee on Lite: the 2% fee is 8 cents, but the minimum is 2 dollars, so you pay 2 dollars on a 4-dollar purchase. Half the price of the coffee. On Plus the 1.5% with a 1-dollar minimum makes the same coffee cost 1 dollar in fees. This is why the free tier is only free for people spending very small amounts very rarely — which is not a description of daily card use.
A 50-dollar monthly software subscription on Lite costs 2 dollars in fees, hitting the 2-dollar minimum. On Pro the same payment costs 50 cents.
A 500-dollar monthly transfer to a supplier in another currency on Lite costs 10 dollars, and that is before any currency conversion cost — the fee for foreign-exchange conversion is not stated anywhere on the card’s pages, which for a card whose whole purpose is cross-border spending is a genuine gap. The USD card is described as “planned to release soon”, and no other card currency is named.
What the card does not tell you: the ATM fee (there is no physical card to reach an ATM, and third-party sources say no ATMs are available), and any protection or insurance on the balance, which is not stated.
How to top up the card
Crypto only. That is the whole of it. The card says deposit options cover 7+ digital currencies but does not name the coins or the networks on its own pages; a third-party site names BTC and USDT. Fiat and on-ramp funding are described as “planned”, which means they do not exist yet. There is no bank transfer.
The mechanics have one sharp edge: before the card is issued, the dashboard shows a minimum activation amount, usually around 15 dollars. Send less and issuance fails. This catches people out constantly, because the wallet balance and the card balance are not the same thing until that minimum is crossed.
Confirmation times vary hugely by network — 20 confirmations on TRC20, from 4 on Bitcoin. That is not a LinkPay setting; it is what those networks require before a transaction is considered settled. It also means a Bitcoin deposit can sit visibly pending for a long time, and you should not assume something has gone wrong when it has not. Who pays the network fee for a deposit is not stated; on-chain gas is charged by the blockchain, not by the card, but the card does not say whether it passes that on to you.
Two practical warnings. First, sending on a network the provider does not support can lose the funds outright or turn into a manual support ticket with no guarantee of recovery — blockchain transfers are simply irreversible. Second, “USDC over TRC20” is not a native option: Circle stopped supporting USDC on Tron in February 2024, so if you hold that pair from an exchange it may be a bridged or wrapped token rather than the real thing.
Paying with it every day
Practically: you take the card number from the dashboard and type it into a checkout like any other virtual card. No physical card, no ATM, no mobile wallet yet.
Apple Pay and Google Pay are “in final integration” and “will be available soon” — and they are unavailable at Basic verification anyway. Note the conflict: the eWallet page says selected virtual cards can be added, while the FAQ says “coming soon”. Third-party reviewers report the same contradiction. If a phone wallet is a requirement rather than a nice-to-have, this card does not have it today.
Apps are available on the App Store and Google Play, plus a direct .APK download. Ratings are not shown on the card’s site, which tells you nothing either way.
Cashback is 0% on Lite, 0% on Plus, 1% on Pro and 2% on Ultra — the headline says “2% cashback for all payments”, which is another simplification to be careful with, and cashback cannot be withdrawn to a bank.
Blocked categories are not listed on the pages I could read. That matters more than it sounds: merchant category codes classify businesses by type, and issuers routinely block whole categories — gambling (MCC 7995) being the classic one. If you spend on a specific type of site, ask. Prepaid and foreign-issued card numbers also attract declines at some merchants, because the BIN lookup reveals the card type and issuer country and the billing address will not match.
If something goes wrong at the till, here is the timeline the card publishes: a failed transaction with a pending authorisation returns in 5 to 10 minutes; merchant refunds usually land within 4 weeks; holds, for example at ad platforms, usually clear in 10 to 14 days; top-ups on an unverified card are auto-cancelled with refunds in 2 to 14 business days; top-ups on a verified card are non-refundable. Complaints are reviewed within 30 days. Chargebacks are the customer’s responsibility, and there is no chargeback process described in the FAQ — meaning the disputes route is documented, but the refund route is not.
What can go wrong
This is the section where LinkPay scores worst, and the reason is not theoretical.
The money is not yours in the strict sense. The balance is held in a custodial Wallet. The provider holds the credentials, so you must trust them completely, and crypto transfers have no built-in recovery — the network cannot reverse anything. The published terms go further: the Administrator may suspend all wallets without notice where there is suspicion or a violation, and funds may be frozen during an investigation. The account locks after three failed login attempts. Badges for GDPR, ISO and PCI DSS are displayed, but insurance on the balance is not stated.
Cards get frozen, and the complaints say so plainly. On Trustpilot, around 39 to 40 reviews give roughly 2 out of 5. The reported pattern: a card frozen before a transaction and allegedly released only after buying a paid plan; withdrawals stuck in “processing” for four or more weeks; waits of months just to get a card issued. The company’s replies cite security protocols and insufficient verification. Support is described by reviewers as slow and repetitive. Independent reviews are a mixed bag, which is worth knowing about.
The issuer is not named. LinkPay is registered in Richmond, British Columbia, Canada, with money-services registration M23039048. Who actually issues the card and stands behind the BIN is not stated. That is not a technicality: when a card is declined or funds are held, the party that must resolve it is normally the issuer, and here you cannot find out who that is.
The partner can take the whole thing down. A competitor reports that a banking partner issuing cards froze cards and withdrawals during a move to a new partner, with waits of months. Read a competitor’s site with care — but the pattern is well known in this category, and it is not a company-specific failing. Card programmes do close: Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX in November 2022, and WaveCrest, a card issuer supplying crypto brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing every programme it had issued.
Regulation cuts both ways. LinkPay’s Canadian registration is real, and it is not the same as the EU or US permissions those users assume. A card is a payment service regulated separately from the crypto side, so a crypto card often rests on two licences — and you only see one of them here. Under MiCA, e-money tokens may be issued only by a credit institution or an e-money institution, and the transitional period for existing providers runs until 1 July 2026 at the latest. In the US, FinCEN treats administrators and exchangers of convertible virtual currency as money transmitters, which is why US citizenship is excluded outright. Safeguarded e-money funds are not the same as bank deposits and may not sit under a deposit guarantee scheme.
Tax sits outside all of this. If you fund payments from crypto, most tax authorities treat each disposal as a taxable event measured in local currency at the value on the date of the transaction. I am not giving tax advice — but you should know that a year of small card payments funded from a volatile asset produces a lot of records to reconcile, and nobody’s fee schedule includes that cost.
What to take instead
The alternatives I looked at all sit in a narrow band, which is itself informative: 5.6, 4.9 and 4.7 out of 10. None of them is a clear upgrade, and each trades one gap for another.
| LinkPay | Cardex | CardFlow | HyperCard | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Score | 5.0 / 10 | 5.6 / 10 | 4.9 / 10 | 4.7 / 10 |
| Card type | Virtual, Visa or Mastercard (unofficial) | Virtual and physical, on VERVE, Visa, Mastercard, UnionPay | Virtual USD Mastercard | Prepaid, network not stated |
| Who it targets | Broad, with a 27-country exclusion list | “One crypto card, 200+ countries”, no exclusions listed | Nigeria, “Nigerians and global users” | No country list published |
| Stated cost | Lite free to Ultra $209/month | Not stated | Virtual card creation free | Not stated |
| Payment fee | 2% min $2 down to 1% | Converted at payment, no percentage published | Not stated | Not stated |
| Funding | Crypto, 7+ currencies | USDT, USDC, BTC | BTC, USDT, ETH or Naira bank transfer | USDT, BTC, ETH, converted to USD or EUR |
| Cashback | 0–2% by plan | Not stated | Not stated | Not stated |
Three things stand out. Cardex is the only one of the four with a physical card option and the only one with a stated multi-network footprint, and it converts at the moment of payment using a rate it says it picks automatically — though it publishes no percentage, which is the same problem LinkPay has in the other direction. CardFlow is the cheapest to start and the only alternative with a bank-transfer funding rail, but its virtual Mastercard takes a few minutes to create and its pricing is unpublished. HyperCard is the vaguest: no country list, no network named, no fees, and its “176 countries” figure describes where the card is accepted, not who can open one.
None of them publishes a clear figure for how much a payment costs in a foreign currency. That is the number I would want from any of them before switching, and it is the number none of them gives.
Who I would recommend it to
Two groups, honestly.
If you run ad accounts and need a stack of virtual cards tied to different platforms, LinkPay’s card limits and team-member allowances are built for exactly that, and the Lite tier’s 2% fee with a 2-dollar floor means small test payments stay cheap while bigger ones hurt — the ladder of tiers is a reasonable way to grow into it.
If your real problem is that a bank will not open an account for you and this is the only card number you can get, it may be worth the trade-offs, provided you treat the balance as money you have handed over rather than money you hold.
I would not recommend it to anyone whose spending depends on a predictable monthly outgoings figure, anyone who needs a physical card or a phone wallet, anyone who wants to hold their own keys, or anyone who will be annoyed by a 4-week merchant refund. The 2% fee on the free tier, the unstated conversion fee, the withdrawal numbers that contradict themselves, and a Trustpilot score of about 2 out of 5 are not problems you should accept quietly.
Frequently asked questions
What is the LinkPay card?
LinkPay is a Canadian-registered crypto platform that issues virtual card numbers against a balance you load with cryptocurrency. It is a custodial wallet with cards attached, not a bank account: the provider holds your funds, converts them as you spend, and bills you a percentage per payment. Registered address Richmond, BC; money-services registration M23039048. It is not a bank.
Is LinkPay a bank, and who owns it?
No — it is not a bank. It is a money-services business registered in Canada. The company behind it is LinkPay itself; the issuer that stands behind the card’s BIN is not stated on its public pages, so you cannot find out which institution actually issues the card or owes you the money if it is held.
Who can get a LinkPay card?
Anyone outside the exclusions: the service is not provided in 27 listed countries including Russia, Belarus, Hong Kong, the United States, Ukraine, Iran, Cuba, Syria and North Korea, and the list is explicitly not exhaustive. Residents and citizens of listed countries are both barred, and US citizens, permanent residents and US entities cannot open accounts at all.
Does the LinkPay card require KYC?
It requires identity documents only above the lowest tier. Without verification you get 500 dollars a month and advertising cards only; Basic is 2,000 dollars a month and needs your full name, address and ID details; full verification removes spend limits and needs a valid ID photo plus a live check. Verification usually completes within 24 hours but can take longer.
How much does LinkPay cost?
Lite is free with 2% per payment and a 2-dollar minimum, so a 4-dollar coffee costs 2 dollars in fees. Plus is 59 dollars a month at 1.5% with a 1-dollar minimum, Pro 179 dollars at 1%, Ultra 209 dollars at 1%. Beware that the Terms of Service price Ultra at 299 dollars with different card and cashback allowances than the site.
How do I top up the LinkPay card?
With crypto only — 7+ currencies, with BTC and USDT named by third-party sources. There is no bank transfer, and fiat funding is “planned”. The dashboard shows a minimum activation amount, usually around 15 dollars, before the card is issued; deposit below it and issuance fails. Send on the network shown for that currency, since transfers are irreversible.
Can I add the LinkPay card to Apple Wallet?
Not yet, as things stand. Apple Pay and Google Pay are described as “in final integration” and “coming soon”, and they are not available at Basic verification. The eWallet page and the FAQ contradict each other on whether selected virtual cards can already be added, so treat mobile wallet support as unavailable until you have seen it work.
Where can I use the LinkPay card?
Anywhere a virtual Visa or Mastercard number is accepted online, and there is no physical card or ATM. Expect the usual virtual-card friction: some merchants decline prepaid or foreign card numbers, and the currency conversion fee is not stated anywhere on the card’s pages, which matters most for cross-border spending.
Is the LinkPay card safe?
Treat it as custodial and exposed. The balance sits in the provider’s wallet, the terms allow all wallets to be suspended without notice, and insurance on funds is not stated. Trustpilot shows roughly 2 out of 5 from around 40 reviews, with reports of frozen cards and withdrawals stuck in “processing” for four or more weeks.
How do I withdraw money from LinkPay?
Withdrawals are requested from the Wallet and the terms say they are processed during 10 working days. Here is the catch: the terms call the withdrawal fee free on all plans while the home page lists 3%, 3%, 2% and 1% by tier — confirm which applies before you rely on it. Cashback cannot be withdrawn to a bank, and you cannot move funds straight from the platform onto a LinkPay card.
Virtual card reviews – cryptocardcheck
Content created by the «cryptocardcheck» team