A prepaid Visa sold through a Telegram bot, rated 4.5 out of 10

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

Chocopay is not a bank. It is a virtual Visa card that lives inside a Telegram bot, sold as a prepaid product with a fixed lifetime — three, six or eighteen months — aimed at users who want to pay for AI tools and subscriptions. That is a narrow job, and for that narrow job the card does a reasonable thing. Outside that job, the picture gets thin: no named issuer, no published conversion fee, no published withdrawal limits, a small public rating and a company registered in Dubai.

I scored it 4.5 out of 10. That is not a dismissal. It is what I get when I add up a cheap card, a workable top-up route and a very small amount of published information about who stands behind it.

The conditions described here are current as of October 28, 2026.

Score table

Who this suits, and who it does not

It suits someone whose real problem is that an ordinary bank card will not work for a specific purchase — a subscription billed in dollars, an AI tool that refuses a card from your country — and who is comfortable moving money through a bot, mostly in rubles, mostly on their own. It also suits anyone who simply prefers paying with a balance they have already loaded, because a prepaid card cannot overdraw and cannot surprise you with a credit line.

It does not suit anyone who needs to be able to complain to a named bank. It does not suit someone who needs a card that works everywhere, because the virtual-only format and the country restrictions bite. It does not suit a cash user: unofficial reports say ATM withdrawal is not supported at all, and if you need physical money this is the wrong product. And if you plan to load money once and keep it for months, read the refund rules in the risks section below first — the window is narrow and it closes permanently after your first successful payment.

Will they give you the card?

Yes, and the bar is unusually low — but “low” here is not the same as “no rules at all”, and the shape of those rules is the first thing to understand.

The terms set no residency or citizenship criteria. Nothing in them asks where you live or what nationality you hold. What they do ask is that clients are at least 18, that they confirm they are not on UN/OFAC/EU/UAE sanctions lists and not politically exposed, and that they accept the restricted-country list. Russia appears in that list at Section 6.3.

The consequence of that list is concrete: cards may not pay sellers linked to listed restricted countries, and payments in RUB and UAH are prohibited. The service also says it “does not guarantee” payments on accounts with a history of Russia linkage — which is a warning that even a payment that looks fine can be refused if the account looks connected.

One more practical detail worth knowing before you plan around this: the service and support are in Russian. If you do not read Russian comfortably, you will be managing the card in a language you are not choosing.

So the honest answer to “will they give me the card” is: almost certainly yes, if you are 18, not sanctioned, not politically exposed, and you accept that payments to certain sellers and in two currencies will not go through. What is genuinely unclear from the public pages is how that country list interacts with your specific merchant — and no more than that: the card’s public pages do not say anything about proof of address.

How to get it

The advertised route is short, and it is worth knowing that the marketing describes the cards as issued “without documents or verification” in the Telegram bot in a couple of minutes. The described sequence: open the bot, read the rules, choose a tariff, issue the card, top it up.

That speed is real for the simple case. Terms Section 8 sets out what happens when it is not: information must be provided within 2 calendar days when requested; automated checks take up to 5 minutes, complex cases take 3 to 10 working days; and refunds from a web account require KYC. Age is 18+.

What you get is a virtual Visa, with the balance in USD. There are three of them:

• Subscriptions and AI — the narrowest one, built for the job the card is actually good at
• Universal — the general-purpose option, the longest-lived at 18 months
• Travel — six months, also a general-purpose shape

Mastercard is not mentioned. Because the product is virtual only, delivery does not apply. If the card gets blocked by a service, refused at a checkout, or fails technically, a replacement is “possible but not in all cases” — and the price of a replacement is not stated.

On identity levels, the picture is unusually thin: no tiers are published. There is no bronze-to-platinum ladder to climb, only the timing rules above — five minutes automated, three to ten working days for a complicated case. Rejection reasons are not stated, so if you are turned down you will not be told which rule caught you.

Fees: what it really costs

The card is cheap to issue and the top-up fee is the number to watch. Most of the rest is either absent from the published terms or only available from third-party sites.

The headline prices: Subscriptions and AI $6 for three months; Travel $10 for six months; Universal $15 for eighteen months, which the portal works out at $0.83 a month. There is no monthly fee in the terms — the price is for the whole lifetime of the card. Then the crypto top-up commission, 3–9%.

Two things jump out of that table and I would not want you to discover them later.

First, the card’s own pages disagree with each other. The portal quotes $6, $10 and $15; the terms-of-operation page quotes $2, $6 or $9, and $6 or $9 when paid in crypto. Those are two different prices for the same product on two pages of the same service, and neither page explains the gap.

Second, the numbers that decide what a purchase actually costs you — the conversion fee, and whether there is a daily or monthly ceiling — are not on the official pages. The $0.75 decline charge and the 2–3% markup on non-USD payments come from a third-party review site (inokarti.com, updated June 2026), not from Chocopay, so treat them as unofficial. Take them as something to ask about, not something to rely on.

Three everyday payments

Suppose your balance is $60 and you are spending ordinary money.

A $20 subscription in dollars. This is the case the card is built for. The card is in USD and the merchant bills in USD, so the $20 comes out of the $60 and there is no conversion at all. Nothing in the official terms says you pay an extra fee for this. It is the cheapest path the card offers.

A €15 subscription on a non-USD merchant. Here the unofficial 2–3% markup would apply, which on €15 is a fraction of a euro — noticeable if you make ten such payments, invisible if you make one. The official conversion fee is not stated, so I cannot tell you the real number from the card’s own pages. If you expect to pay in euros or yen regularly, that gap matters more than the issuance price ever will.

A declined payment. The merchant’s checkout rejects the card — a foreign BIN, a merchant category the issuer dislikes, a name mismatch on the billing address. According to unofficial data (inokarti.com, June 2026), each refusal costs $0.75 (this figure is unofficial and not confirmed by the card issuer), and there is no stated cap on how many declines can happen in a day. This is the fee most likely to bite you in practice, and the one I would ask the support team about before you rely on the card for anything important.

How to top it up

Three routes are named: Russian bank cards, SBP (the Russian instant-payment system) in rubles, and cryptocurrency — the crypto option described as “more than 100 coins”. Card-to-card transfers are not supported.

Here is the friction. The specific coins and networks are not listed. The claim is a hundred-plus; the menu is not published. That matters more than it sounds — blockchain transfers are irreversible, so 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 recovery with no guarantee of success. Who pays the network fee on the way in is also not stated.

The minimums are clear: from $15 by rubles (SBP or Russian cards), from $30 by crypto. The crypto fee is 3–9%, and the ruble amount is calculated inside the bot. One unofficial source says only your own money is accepted and third-party or company cards are refused; that is not stated officially, but it is worth assuming you cannot top up Chocopay from someone else’s card.

The reason to read this section twice is the fee spread. Three to nine percent is not a rounding difference. On a $300 load the difference between the low and high end is eighteen dollars — more than the card itself costs, several times over. Ask which figure applies to the coin and network you plan to use, before you send, because you cannot get it back afterwards.

Paying with it every day

The card is a Visa, and only the Universal and Travel cards list Apple Pay and Google Pay. Subscriptions and AI does not list them. Binding a wallet needs a confirmation code from a manager during working hours, which is a small friction that matters if you are outside the support window when you try.

The card spends in USD, and the portal says payments are possible in more than 140 currencies — the listed ones being USD, JPY, EUR, KZT, TRY, ILS, GBP, THB and GEL. RUB and UAH payments are prohibited.

There is a ban list, and it is long enough to read before you buy anything. Blocked: payments to services linked to Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and other countries restricted for Visa and Mastercard; payments in rubles and hryvnias; adult 18+ services; casinos and betting. The stated consequence of a violation is blocking “without refund of the money”. That is the sharpest sentence in the terms, and it is worth reading as what it says: the money is gone.

Two smaller things. There is no cashback stated; the only incentive on the portal is a referral bonus of +$2. And the whole thing runs through a Telegram bot with no standalone app, which also means no store ratings anywhere — you will not find the familiar app-store section when you go looking for reputation.

The banned categories are not just a rules list for their own sake. Merchants classify their business with a four-digit merchant category code assigned under ISO 18245, and gambling has its own code — many issuers block specific categories by policy rather than by law, and the blocked list varies between issuers. That is why a card can fail at one checkout and work at another with no visible difference to you.

What can go wrong

Here is where the thinness of the published information becomes the main risk rather than a footnote.

You may not get your money back once you have paid. For bot users the balance is returned only if the card was issued within 30 days, has no completed transactions, and has not been started or accepted. Any successful payment blocks returns outright. The issuance fee and commissions are excluded, there is no refund if the card was issued and first topped up with crypto, refunds are paid within 14 working days, and a hold of up to 30 working days applies if fraud is suspected. Web-account users get a refund to the original wallet minus network fees, and that path requires KYC. One third-party source (inokarti.com, June 2026, unofficial) adds a $5 charge for a refund.

There is no named bank. The cards are described as “of foreign banks”, and the issuing bank and licences are not named. The company behind it is CYPHER GOODS WHOLESALERS LLC, registration number 1049902, Office No. 301A, Dubai Investment Properties (LLC), Al Raqqa, Dubai. A third-party site reports no public financial licence (unofficial, inokarti.com, June 2026). This is not a scandal by itself — plenty of legitimate card programmes are managed by companies that are not banks — but it does mean that when something goes wrong, the name on the other side of the complaint is a Dubai company, not an institution with a deposit guarantee behind it.

Your money is held by someone else. The terms describe a custodial product: a virtual card for international purchases for a set period, not a bank account. The same terms cap liability at the last month’s commission, with a maximum of $100. That cap is worth reading twice. If your balance is $900 and something goes wrong, the stated ceiling on their side of the line is $100. Two-factor authentication and self-custody are not stated. Cards freeze after expiry or after many declines at zero balance, and can be unfrozen in the bot; a card may be cancelled after 30 days of inactivity.

Independent reputation is thin. I found no official incidents — and I want to be honest about what that means, because it means two things at once. There is no recorded blow-up, and there is also very little data. A review-site rating is 3.8 from 25 reviews, with the site itself calling that “not enough data” (inokarti.com). A 2026 vc.ru ranking notes that there is no confirmation that Chocopay works for paying a Claude subscription. No Trustpilot page was found, and no dated events were found anywhere in what I could check. Complaint themes are not available for the same reason: there are not enough reviews to have themes.

Support is fast and narrow. Contact is through the official Telegram support or [email protected]; a manager replies in up to 5 minutes, and support runs 09:00–21:00 MSK while the bot runs at any time. Refunds may be held up to 30 working days on suspected fraud or a bank review, and within 14 working days otherwise. The chargeback process is not stated — and a chargeback, the mechanism your bank normally uses to reverse a disputed payment, is exactly what a prepaid card issued by an unnamed foreign bank is least likely to give you.

One general point about this whole category, since it bears on the card: programmes do close. Visa suspended WaveCrest in Europe in 2018, closing all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes, and in November 2022 Visa said it had terminated its global agreements with FTX, with the FTX US debit card wound down by its issuer. A 2026 closure reported by a secondary source had new loads ending 8 July 2026 and spending stopping 8 August 2026 — single source, unconfirmed, and I include it only as a shape of what happens, not as a fact about anything you are considering.

What to take instead

If Chocopay’s specific fit — rubles in, dollars out, one subscription at a time — is not your situation, these are the three other options from the same shortlist, with their own scores.

Where each of them is genuinely stronger, and where none of them is.

MaxSwap is the most transparent on the numbers, which matters a lot when you are comparing costs. It publishes the card price, the deposit requirement, the top-up fee and the per-transaction fee, and it names the coins it accepts — ADA, ALGO, AVAX, BCH, BNB, BTC, DOT, ETH, HBAR, HT, KRRX, LINK, LTC, MATIC, NEAR, SHIB, SUSHI, TON, TRX, UNI, USDC, USDT, XLM, XRP. Against that, its entry cost is much higher: 50 USD for the card, plus a required first deposit, for a total issuance listed at 77.125 USD, and it is a Mastercard rather than a Visa, which closes some doors. It has no separate FX rate published — the site just tells you to take possible fees into account when paying and converting. Eligibility is not stated; the site claims no geographical restrictions.

Ape Wallet is the cheapest-looking entry, if you can pin the price down. It offers a “service card” for subscriptions and online payments plus a separate card for Apple Pay and Google Pay, funds its balance in USDT, and charges no fee on transfers to other users by Telegram username. It also shows the fee and total before you confirm any operation, which is a habit worth wanting. But the issuance price is not stated — promo codes change it, and holders of an active Apple Pay or Google Pay card get a discount on a service card — and it focuses on Russia, with SBP payments and passport KYC using a Russian passport. Nothing is said about citizenship versus residence or restrictions. It has a two-level referral programme that pays a share of invited users’ purchases, with no percentages given.

AnoCard has the most flexibility and the least published. Its virtual cards are reloadable or single-use products from several BINs, filtered in the SORN web dashboard, with network and currency depending on which BIN you pick. Creation fee, maintenance fee, top-up percentage and minimum all depend on the route and are shown in SORN before you pay. The referral terms are the most specific of the three: $5 per referred card creation and 0.25% of referred top-ups. One practical warning: the AnoCard page was down at the time of review, so treat everything above as read from what was available rather than as verified today.

None of the four is a bank, and none of them changes the underlying shape of the risk. What separates them is how much they tell you before you commit. If that is your deciding factor, MaxSwap and Ape Wallet tell you more; if the deciding factor is price, Chocopay tells you the least.

Who I would recommend it to

To the person who has already decided their problem is narrow: a single AI subscription or a small stack of them, paid for in dollars, funded from a Russian card or SBP, with a total budget per card of well under twenty dollars, and who is not planning to spend months of money through it. For that person the three-dollar-a-month Subscriptions and AI card at $6 is a fair trade, and the bot-based flow is genuinely quick.

I would steer everyone else elsewhere — not because the card is dishonest, but because it asks you to accept unknowns as the price of admission. You are told there is no issuer name, no published licence, no published conversion fee, no published limits, no chargeback process, a liability cap of $100, and a refund window that closes the moment your first payment succeeds. That is a lot of not-knowing for something intended to hold real money, and the 3.8 rating from 25 reviews is too thin a sample to argue the other way.

If you want the same job done with more published detail and a higher entry cost, look at MaxSwap. If you want the cheapest possible entry and you already live inside the Russian payments system, look at Ape Wallet and pin down the current price first. If you need to hold a balance across many different assets and currencies and you do not mind doing your own homework in a dashboard, AnoCard is the flexible one.

And before you pick any of them, one habit from this category that costs nothing: check whether the provider appears in your regulator’s register of authorised crypto-asset service providers, and keep a note of the network and coin you are about to send, because a transfer on the wrong network is not something anyone can undo for you.

Frequently asked questions

What is Chocopay?

Chocopay is a prepaid virtual Visa card sold through a Telegram bot, not a bank account. You buy one of three tariffs — Subscriptions and AI, Universal or Travel — pay a fixed price for a set lifetime of three, six or eighteen months, and spend only the balance you have loaded. The card is USD-denominated and aimed at users paying for AI tools and subscriptions. The company named in the terms is CYPHER GOODS WHOLESALERS LLC in Dubai.

How does Chocopay work?

You load a balance, the service converts or holds it, and the card spends that balance like a prepaid card. Because it is prepaid rather than debit, it cannot overdraw and there is no credit line. The card is virtual only — there is nothing to be delivered — and Apple Pay and Google Pay are listed on the Universal and Travel cards, with a manager sending a confirmation code during working hours to bind them. Spending beyond the loaded balance stops the card rather than creating a debt.

Is Chocopay a bank?

No. The terms describe the cards as “of foreign banks” without naming one, and they describe the product as a virtual card for international purchases for a set period. The company behind it is registered in Dubai, and the issuing bank and licences are not named on the public pages. A third-party site reports no public financial licence, which is unofficial and not confirmed by the card. Your liability under the terms is capped at the last month’s commission, up to $100.

Who can get a Chocopay card?

The terms set no residency or citizenship criteria. You must be at least 18, confirm you are not on UN, OFAC, EU or UAE sanctions lists and are not politically exposed, and accept that payments to sellers linked to listed restricted countries are blocked — Russia appears in that list — and that RUB and UAH payments are prohibited. Service and support are in Russian. The public pages say nothing about proof of address.

Does Chocopay require KYC?

The cards are marketed as issued without documents or verification, and that is how the simple automated path works — checks take up to five minutes. But the terms allow the service to request information within two calendar days, and complex cases can take three to ten working days. Refunds from a web account require KYC. No identity tiers are published and rejection reasons are not stated, so you cannot tell in advance which path you will land on.

What does a Chocopay card cost?

Issuance is $6 for Subscriptions and AI, $10 for Travel and $15 for Universal, and there is no monthly fee in the terms — Universal is $0.83 a month across its 18 months. Crypto top-up commission runs from 3% to 9%, which can cost far more than the card. Unofficial sources add $0.75 per declined transaction and a 2–3% markup on non-USD payments. The official conversion fee is not stated, and the card’s own pages list different issuance prices.

Can I use Chocopay in my country?

You can add the card to Apple Pay or Google Pay on the Universal and Travel cards, and payments are offered in more than 140 currencies, with USD, JPY, EUR, KZT, TRY, ILS, GBP, THB and GEL listed. But payments to services linked to Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and other Visa or Mastercard restricted countries are blocked, as are ruble and hryvnia payments, adult 18+ services, casinos and betting. Violations can get you blocked without a refund, so check your merchant against that list first.

How do I top up and can I get the money back?

You can top up from Russian bank cards, from SBP in rubles, or with cryptocurrency described as more than 100 coins — though the specific coins and networks are not listed. Minimums are $15 by rubles and $30 by crypto. Getting money back is narrow: within 30 days of issue, no completed transactions, no first top-up by crypto, and any successful payment blocks a refund entirely.

Is Chocopay safe?

No incidents are on record, but the sample is thin: a review-site rating of 3.8 from 25 reviews that the site itself calls insufficient data, and no Trustpilot page. What is missing matters as much as what is there — no named issuer, no published licence, no chargeback process, no published spending limits, and liability capped at up to $100. Support replies within 5 minutes, 09:00–21:00 MSK. Treat it as a small prepaid balance, not as money you would keep.

What should I pick instead of Chocopay?

MaxSwap publishes its numbers most fully — card, deposit, top-up fee, transaction fee and an accepted-coin list — but costs 50 USD plus a required first deposit. Ape Wallet is the cheapest-looking entry with fees shown before you confirm, though its issuance price is not fixed. AnoCard is the most flexible across BINs and assets, with fees shown in its dashboard before payment, but little is published. All three are also prepaid products from named non-bank companies, so the same underlying caution applies.

Content created by the «cryptocardselect» team