Prepaid Credit Card refused (Orange/MasterCard)

SnowTiger

A couple of my pre-paid Mastercards have been declined recently.

Worldpay (payment processor) had problems collecting a payment from my AA Spend & Earn card last month for web hosting and very.co.uk have also recently rejected a payment.

I received an email from Micosoft today to let me know that a payment from my Orange Cash card was recently rejected too.

All transactions were genuine and for relatively small amounts and the cards carry balances of several times the amount requested.

The funds are available and haven't been earmarked for anything else, except for the payment to very.co.uk which was rejected and is marked on my AA Spend & Earn account as pending. It will probably bounce back in a few days.

I'm wondering if some retailers are simply rejecting payments from pre-payment card, perhaps due to high levels of fraud.

The very.co.uk case is a little odd. However, one of my credit cards also blocked a payment to them a while ago. I'd imagine catalogue fraud is quite high.

I find prepayment cards useful for setting up small continuous transaction because they are way to limit my exposure.