Two virtual cards, one funding rail, and a lot of silence from the public pages
Available in US
Zambulay is two virtual cards and one way to fill them — USDT on TRC-20. The Black card is built for Google and Meta ad accounts, the Platinum one connects to Apple Pay on iPhone and Apple Watch. The public pages are thin, and what they do not say matters as much as what they say. I went through the card’s own terms and pages, and the reviews people leave about it, to give you a picture you can decide against. My score for it is 6.2 out of 10.
Conditions are current as of October 28, 2026.
The conditions described here are current as of 2026.
Verdict: 6.2 out of 10, and the score is not close to a recommendation
Let me start with the number, because you should see where I landed before you read a word of reasoning. Zambulay scores 6.2 / 10 in my assessment. That is a card that does a narrow job competently and is unusually quiet about most of the things you would need to know to trust it. If your whole use case is paying for advertising and subscriptions out of a USDT TRC-20 balance, and you are comfortable with a card whose issuer is not even named on the site, this may serve you. If you want an ordinary everyday card, or you are the kind of person who reads the fees before they read the features, it will disappoint you — and you will find better-documented options.
The score table below is the whole picture in one place. Every row is one of the criteria I scored, with the mark I gave and why.
| Criterion | Mark | Reason in short |
|---|---|---|
| Who can get it | 9 / 10 | Black: “No country or spend limits”; Platinum: “Works worldwide”; no country list is published |
| Cost | 7 / 10 | Issuance from $3; account top-up 0%; card top-up from 1.5%; reviewers complain fees run several times above competitors; conversion fee is not disclosed |
| Top-up options | 4 / 10 | Only USDT (TRC-20), instantly |
| Reliability and complaints | 4 / 10 | 3-102-944750 SRL (Costa Rica), issuer not named; Trustpilot 4.1 out of 10 in reviews, complaints about fees and a first card that did not work |
| Everyday use | 5 / 10 | Virtual only: Black for advertising dashboards, Platinum with Apple Pay; Google Pay not named, no plastic and no ATM |
| Total | 6.2 / 10 | Strong on access, weak on disclosure, funding rails and complaints |
Read the two strongest rows and the two weakest rows together. “Who can get it” scores highest because Zambulay publishes almost no restrictions — no country list, no spend limits quoted for Black. That openness is also why “Reliability and complaints” scores lowest: there is no issuer to name, and the reviews that do exist are mixed. The card suits a narrow reader and does not suit a general one.
Will they give you the card?
Yes, on the card’s own account there is very little standing in the way. The Black card is described as having “No country or spend limits” and the Platinum card as one that “Works worldwide”. No list of eligible or excluded countries appears on the public pages. There is no numeric spend cap published for either card.
I want to be careful with how I read that, because it is easy to mistake silence for permission. “No country or spend limits” is the marketing phrase; what is absent is any published eligibility rule, any age or residency condition, and any numeric ceiling I could find. If you are in a country where you are unsure whether such a card may lawfully be issued to you, the honest position is that the card’s pages will not tell you — and that question belongs with a local professional, not with me. What I can tell you is that the card does not publish a blocklist, which is different from promising that every person everywhere will be approved.
How to get it
The signup story is short, which is either a selling point or a warning sign depending on what you were expecting. KYC is not mentioned anywhere on the public pages; the only application step described is a contact-details form. For comparison, the general rule in this category is that regulated businesses are expected to verify customers under anti-money-laundering law, and that in the EU customer due diligence normally covers name, address, date of birth, nationality, identity documentation, a sanctions check and a politically-exposed-person check. If due diligence cannot be completed, rules generally require the institution to hold off or close the relationship. So a page that never mentions verification is telling you something about what it publishes, not necessarily about what happens behind the form. Trustpilot reviewers, in 2026, praised quick sign-up and no complicated verification — but that is user report from a third-party site, unofficial, and not confirmed by the card.
What you actually get is virtual. There are two: a Black card, compatible with Google and Meta ad accounts, and a Platinum card that works with Apple Pay. The card network and the card currency are not stated. KYC levels, if any exist, are not stated either. Delivery is virtual only, so there is no waiting on the post.
The two cards are not one card with two badges. Black is for advertising dashboards — its own published purpose is Google and Meta ad accounts. Platinum is the everyday-facing one: it “Connects to iPhone and Apple Watch in seconds”. There is no price-and-feature table comparing the two, which means I cannot tell you what distinguishes them beyond those uses, and I will not invent a comparison the card has not published.
What it really costs
The Fees picture is the one I would want you to read twice. Here is everything the card publishes, in one table, with the gaps marked as gaps.
| Fee or limit | What the card says |
|---|---|
| Issuance | “Issuance fee from $3” |
| Monthly fee | not stated |
| Account top-up | “0% fee for account top-up” |
| Card top-up | “from 1.5%” |
| Conversion fee | not stated |
| FX fee | not stated |
| ATM | not stated |
| Daily limits | not stated; Black card is described as having “No country or spend limits”, no numbers given |
| Monthly limits | not stated |
| Card currency | not stated |
Now the two or three payments that actually happen in a normal week, and which of these lines bites.
Paying for a Google or Meta ad account from your Black card draws on a balance you have already loaded. If you funded the account by top-up, the “from 1.5%” card-load fee is the one that applies. If you funded the account directly, the “0% fee for account top-up” is the line that applies. Either way, when the card later spends that balance — and the card currency is not stated, while your own money may be in dollars or something else — the conversion and FX fees are the ones that would apply, and those are exactly the two figures the card does not publish. This is the part that should make you pause: the numbers that are printed are the ones you can find anywhere; the numbers that decide your real cost are the ones that are missing.
The Trustpilot picture sharpens this. A user report from May 2026 describes the commission as “several times higher than that of competitors”, giving $100 costing about $20, and a first card that did not work so a second one was bought. That is one user’s account on a third-party site, unofficial and not confirmed by the card, but it is consistent with the shape of the published numbers: a “from 1.5%” load fee with no conversion rate on the other side of it can land anywhere.
Two limits worth carrying in your head from the wider category, even though they are not Zambulay-specific: a card that draws on a stored balance cannot overdraw it, and a declined authorisation can leave a hold on your funds for several days, typically up to seven. There are no ATM and no plastic, so the ATM line stays empty by design rather than by omission.
How to top it up
There is one route, and it is a narrow one: “Top up via USDT (TRC-20)”, instant. Fees on the way in are the “0% fee for account top-up” and the “from 1.5%” on card loads. The minimum, and who pays the network fee, are not stated.
TRC-20 is the Tron network, and the mechanics there are worth ten seconds of your attention because they are where user money quietly disappears. Tron prices transactions with bandwidth and energy, and fees are often paid by burning TRX. 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. There is also a detail that trips people up specifically around USDT: Circle stopped supporting USDC on Tron in February 2024, so if you try to send USDC “over TRC20” it is not a native option. If you are used to moving both stablecoins, check the coin before you press send, not after.
Withdrawals are described as “within 30 minutes” — that is a platform feature, and its fees are not stated.
Paying with it every day
Everyday use is where Zambulay is thinnest, and the score reflects it. There is no physical card and no ATM. The Black card is for ad accounts. The Platinum card is your Apple Pay route — it connects to iPhone and Apple Watch in seconds, which is genuinely convenient if that is your wallet. Google Pay is not mentioned. There is no standalone app; the service lives in a web workspace at client.zambulay.com. Rewards are not stated, blocked categories are not stated, and how disputes work is not stated.
A web-only interface is worth a moment of thought. It works in a browser, which is convenient and also means your card sits behind whatever protections your browser and device have, with no native app doing tokenisation or freezing for you. None of that is a complaint about Zambulay — it is simply what “no standalone app” means in practice.
One category fact helps explain the shape of this card. Apple Pay replaces the card number with a device-specific number stored in the phone’s Secure Element, never on Apple’s servers, and each payment uses a one-time dynamic code. That is why a virtual card built around Apple Pay can feel more solid than its paper-thin documentation suggests: the payment credential itself is not the raw card number. It does not, however, answer the questions a reader actually has, which are what it costs and who stands behind it.
What can go wrong
I found no official incident reports about Zambulay. What I did find were user reports on Trustpilot, and I want to separate clearly what is official from what is not.
The company behind the card is 3-102-944750 SRL, registered in Costa Rica, at Provincia Puntarenas 06, Canton 11 Garabito, Jaco, 61101. The ultimate beneficial owner is named as Stanislav Mickevic. The site’s own disclaimer states that it is “not a bank, credit institution, financial intermediary or financial advisor” and that its offers “are provided by third-party companies”. The card issuer is not named. Read that disclaimer twice, because it is doing real work: it tells you that the entity you are dealing with markets and front-ends a product, and that the regulated institutions behind it are somewhere the page does not point to.
How complaints look, then, is mostly user report. On Trustpilot the rating shown is 4.1 out of 5 from 10 reviews, though the display is inconsistent — one capture showed 5/43 reviews and sources disagree, so treat the exact figure as soft. The themes that recur: high fees (May 2026), a first card that did not work, and support that is sometimes slow. Support itself is live chat from 10:00 to 19:00 Moscow time, “handled within 1 minute”, plus Telegram and [email protected].
The wider category gives you a frame for what “can go wrong” means with cards like this. A prepaid-style card spends only a balance you have pre-loaded, so it cannot overdraw, but a declined payment can hold funds for days. Merchants can look up the issuing institution and country from the card’s first digits and apply extra scrutiny when the issuer country differs from the billing address — which is why a card issued in one country can look “foreign” in another, and why some shops decline prepaid or foreign-issued cards. In the US, debit card reversal rights come from Regulation E and credit card rights from Regulation Z; prepaid-card coverage varies and should not be assumed. And programmes do close: Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022 and the FTX US debit card was wound down by its issuer; WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all its Visa programmes.
None of those closures were Zambulay. I am not predicting one. But when a card’s own pages name no issuer, you are the one holding the risk, and the pattern above is what that risk has looked like across this category.
What to take instead
If any of what I have described gives you pause — the missing conversion fee, the single-network funding, the unnamed issuer — there are three alternatives worth putting next to it. I have scored them on the same footing for you.
CardFlow scores 4.9 / 10. It aims at Nigeria, calling itself “Nigeria’s smartest fintech card platform” and serving “Nigerians and global users”, with no country list or exclusions stated. It issues a virtual USD Mastercard created in 3 minutes, and creating a virtual card is “completely free” per its own FAQ. Its fees are not stated. You can fund it with Bitcoin, USDT, ETH or a Naira bank transfer, though networks are not stated. Rewards are not stated.
HyperCard scores 4.7 / 10. Official pages state no country list; the App Store says the card works in “more than 176 countries” — note that is acceptance, not eligibility. It is a prepaid card, network not stated on the App Store page, with a balance in USD or EUR. Costs are not stated and the App Store page lists no fees. You deposit crypto such as USDT, BTC or ETH in the app, and it converts to USD or EUR on the card; networks are not stated. Rewards are not stated.
Card.fi scores 6.6 / 10, the highest of the four here, and the most fully documented. Its banner says cards ship to “200+ countries”, and its terms bar residents of, or orders from, “a country subject to sanctions that would prohibit the service”; there is no citizenship-versus-residence rule beyond that. It offers Virtual Classic and Virtual Premium, physical Classic and Premium, and a metal (stainless steel) option, with every physical order including a virtual card, issued “under licence from the relevant card schemes” — though Visa and Mastercard are not named — and card currency not stated. Costs are one-time: Virtual Classic $49, Virtual Premium $249, with physical and metal prices not listed and no monthly, annual, inactivity or minimum-balance fee. Fees are spelled out: top-up Classic 1.5% plus $1.00, Premium 1%; FX Classic 3.5%, Premium 2.5%; and a conversion fee shown before each top-up in the terms. It supports 32 coins across 5 networks (Ethereum, Base, BNB Chain, Solana, Kaanch), including USDT, USDC, ETH, BNB, SOL and KAANCH, with a deposit address per card and conversion at market rate on arrival — but sending on the wrong chain risks permanent loss. Rewards are cashback on card spending only: Classic 0.8% capped at 10 USDT a month, Premium 1%, Metal 1.2% (cap 100 USDT/month, 5,000 USDT) or 2% (cap 250 USDT/month, 20,000 USDT); a headline 10% at coffee shops capped at 10 USDT/month; and interest on balances “up to 18%” on Metal, variable.
The comparison to hold in your head: Card.fi is the expensive-but-explicit option — you pay a real one-time fee and real top-up and FX percentages, but nothing about your cost is a surprise. Zambulay is the cheap-and-silent option — issuance from $3 and a 0% account top-up read well on paper, but the fee that will actually decide your bill is the one they have not printed.
Who I would recommend it to
I would recommend Zambulay to exactly one kind of person: someone already living in USDT on TRC-20 whose regular spending is advertising dashboards and Apple Pay subscriptions, who has checked the conversion cost on their own transactions and found it acceptable, and who is not troubled that the issuer is not named. That person gets a card that connects to iPhone and Apple Watch in seconds, tops up instantly, and does not quote country limits.
I would not recommend it to anyone building a primary everyday card, to anyone who needs a physical card or cash withdrawal, to anyone who wants Google Pay, or to anyone who reads “fees not stated” as a red flag rather than a footnote. If you are in that group, take the alternatives above — Card.fi especially, because at least you will know what you are paying.
And if you are weighing this because you have trouble getting an ordinary bank card, I would think twice before making a virtual USDT card your workaround. The rules on who may be issued such a card, and under what conditions, are exactly the rules these pages do not publish, and that is a question for someone who can advise on your situation rather than for a review.
Frequently asked questions
What is Zambulay card?
Zambulay is a Costa Rica-based service, operated by 3-102-944750 SRL, that issues virtual payment cards funded with USDT. Two are offered: a Black card for Google and Meta ad accounts, and a Platinum card that connects to Apple Pay on iPhone and Apple Watch. Its own site states it is “not a bank, credit institution, financial intermediary or financial advisor”. I scored it 6.2 / 10.
How does Zambulay card work?
You send USDT on the TRC-20 network to your account, then load that balance onto a virtual card and spend it like an ordinary card number. Because it draws on a pre-loaded balance rather than a bank account, it cannot overdraw. The catch is transparency: the card’s own pages do not publish a conversion fee or an FX fee, so the cost of spending depends on figures you cannot see in advance.
Is Zambulay a bank?
No, and the site says so itself: it is “not a bank, credit institution, financial intermediary or financial advisor”, and its offers “are provided by third-party companies”. The registered entity is 3-102-944750 SRL in Garabito, Jaco, Costa Rica, with Stanislav Mickevic as the ultimate beneficial owner. The actual card issuer is not named on the public pages.
Who owns Zambulay?
The card’s terms point to 3-102-944750 SRL, registered in Costa Rica at Provincia Puntarenas 06, Canton 11 Garabito, Jaco, 61101. The named ultimate beneficial owner is Stanislav Mickevic. Beyond that, the public pages do not describe who issues the card itself, or which third-party companies stand behind the offer.
Does Zambulay card require KYC?
KYC is not mentioned anywhere on the public pages; the only application step described is a contact-details form. Trustpilot reviewers in 2026 praised quick sign-up and no complicated verification — but that is user report on a third-party site, unofficial and not confirmed by the card. In general, regulated businesses are usually expected to verify customers and screen sanctions.
How do I get and activate Zambulay card?
You fill in a contact-details form and receive a virtual card — there is no plastic and nothing to wait for in the post. Black is aimed at Google and Meta ad accounts; Platinum works with Apple Pay. The pages describe no separate activation step and no KYC levels, and the card network and card currency are not stated. I would check what a card number looks like before you rely on it.
How do I top up the card?
The single documented route is USDT on the TRC-20 network, and it is instant. The card publishes “0% fee for account top-up” and “from 1.5%” on card loads; the minimum and who pays the network fee are not stated. Transfers are irreversible, so check the network carefully before sending — a deposit to the wrong network can be lost.
How much does Zambulay cost?
Issuance is “from $3” and a monthly fee is not stated. Account top-up is “0% fee” and card top-up is “from 1.5%”. The conversion fee and the FX fee are both not stated, and those are the ones that decide what a payment really costs. A May 2026 Trustpilot reviewer described paying about $20 on $100 — several times competitors’ rates — which is user report, not confirmed.
Is Zambulay card safe, and is it worth it?
Safe enough to try with money you can afford to lose, is my honest read, given the issuer is unnamed and the site carries a not-a-bank disclaimer. Whether it is “worth it” depends entirely on whether you can see your conversion cost clearly. If you cannot, you are gambling on an unpublished number. If your spending is stablecoins-heavy and small, that risk is manageable.
Can I withdraw money and use it in my country?
Withdrawals are described as “within 30 minutes” as a platform feature, with fees not stated. There is no physical card and no ATM, so cash is not part of the design. On countries, the card says “Works worldwide” and “No country or spend limits” but publishes no actual country list, so eligibility for a specific country is something the pages do not answer for you.
Virtual cards: your questions answered – cryptocardanswers
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