A Russian-language Telegram bot issuing virtual Visa cards from a Dubai company

Updated October 2026

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Chocopay is a service that issues virtual Visa cards from a Telegram bot. The cards are sold in three flavours — Subscriptions and AI, Universal and Travel — and they draw on a balance funded either by Russian bank cards and SBP transfers in rubles or by cryptocurrency. The service describes itself as cards “without documents or verification,” and the company behind it, CYPHER GOODS WHOLESALERS LLC, is registered in Dubai. That is the broad shape of what we are looking at: a virtual, prepaid, USD-denominated Visa sold in Telegram, marketed to international users paying for AI tools and online subscriptions, with no licensed bank named in public documents.

The conditions in this review are current as of October 28, 2026.

Verdict

Chocopay scores 4.5 out of 10. That is a below-average mark, and the reasons sit in the same place: cost and the things the public pages do not tell you.

The card suits a narrow reader: a user, comfortable in Telegram, who wants a USD-denominated virtual Visa to pay for AI tools or subscription services, who does not need a physical card, and who is aware that the issuing bank is not named on the service’s pages. It does not suit a reader who wants a transparent fee schedule, a refund path after a successful payment, an ATM card, or the protections that come with a regulated e-money institution.

Who can get the card

The terms do not set a citizenship or residence test. You must be at least 18, confirm that you are not on the UN, OFAC, EU or UAE sanctions lists, and confirm that you are not a politically exposed person. Beyond that, the public pages do not list the countries they accept or reject.

What they do list is what the card cannot do once issued. The card cannot pay merchants linked to a set of restricted countries, and Russia appears in that list in Section 6.3 of the terms. Payments in rubles and hryvnias are prohibited, and the service says it does not “guarantee” payments on accounts that have a history of Russia linkage. So the card is sold in Russian and aimed at users, but its own terms can refuse a payment once it sees where the merchant is based. If your subscription is billed by a Russian company, it will not work. The same is true for Ukraine-linked merchants. This is the practical ceiling on the card’s usefulness, and it is set by the card itself, not by anything the reader does.

Service and support are in Russian. The bot is in Russian, the support hours are listed as 09:00-21:00 MSK, and the official email is in English only as an address ([email protected]); the team that replies speaks Russian. If you do not read Russian, you will struggle to get through onboarding or a dispute.

How to get it

The card is sold inside a Telegram bot. Marketing describes cards “without documents or verification” — and the process is meant to take a couple of minutes: open the bot, read the rules, choose a tariff, issue the card, and top it up.

The terms do tell a slightly different story. Section 8 says the service may request information from you, and you have two calendar days to provide it. Automated checks can take up to five minutes; complex cases take three to ten working days. If you register through the web account and ask for a refund back to your wallet, that path requires KYC. So “no verification” is the marketing line; “verification if we ask, and a refund path that needs documents” is the operational reality.

There is no age tier system. There are three cards by purpose and lifetime rather than by verification level:

• Subscriptions and AI — $6, valid for 3 months.
• Universal — $15, valid for 18 months (the page markets it as “$0.83/month”).
• Travel — $10, valid for 6 months.

All three are virtual Visa cards held in USD. There is no Mastercard, no physical card, no separate “premium” tier with more features. A replacement card is “possible but not in all cases” — for example if a service blocks the card or it is not accepted — and the price for a replacement is not stated.

If you need proof of address to open an account, that requirement is not stated. The public pages do not list it.

What it really costs

The headline prices are low, and the running costs are where the card gets expensive. There is no monthly fee in the terms, but the issue fee and the top-up commission do most of the damage.

There are two numbers in the issue row because the portal and the terms-of-operation page disagree. The portal says $6 / $10 / $15; the terms-of-operation page says $2, $6 or $9. Treat the portal figure as the live price, since that is what you actually pay in the bot.

The conversion and FX fee on card spending is not stated officially. A third-party source lists a 2-3% markup on non-USD payments and a $0.75 charge on every declined attempt, but those numbers are unofficial and not confirmed by Chocopay.

To make this concrete, three everyday payments.

Subscription paid in USD, topped up in rubles. You send the ruble equivalent of $30 from a Russian card or SBP. The bot’s rate determines how many rubles you pay; the public pages do not publish a percentage. Your $30 lands on the balance and the subscription is charged in dollars, so there is no FX step at the merchant. The cost of this payment is the ruble top-up commission, whatever it is on the day, plus the $30 you wanted to load.

Subscription paid in EUR, topped up in crypto. You send $30 of USDT or another coin from your own wallet. The card provider takes a 3-9% commission on the way in, so between $0.90 and $2.70 disappears before the balance is credited. The merchant is then paid in euros; the unofficial source lists a 2-3% markup on that conversion, so a further $0.60 to $0.90 of value is lost. A $30 top-up can end up funding roughly $26 to $28 of actual spending.

A card decline. The merchant rejects the card — a common outcome with foreign-issued prepaid BINs — and the bot charges $0.75 for the declined attempt, per the unofficial source. There is no monthly fee, so the cost of using the card for a year on the Universal tariff is the $15 issue fee plus whatever the top-up and FX commissions add up to over that year.

The card is cheap to issue and surprisingly expensive to use.

Top up

The bot accepts two routes: Russian bank cards and SBP in rubles, and cryptocurrency. Card-to-card transfers between Chocopay balances are not supported, and the service does not list the specific coins and networks it accepts — it says “more than 100 coins.” That number is marketing, not a checklist you can verify.

Ruble top-ups have a $15 minimum. The ruble amount is calculated in the bot at the service’s own rate, so the rate is whatever the bot says it is at the moment you confirm. Crypto top-ups have a $30 minimum and a 3-9% commission. The public pages do not say who pays the on-chain network fee, which is the gas or bandwidth that the blockchain charges for moving the coin into the service’s wallet. In practice that fee is paid by the sender in almost every case, and it is on top of the 3-9% commission.

The bot’s terms say the account must be funded from your own funds; a third-party card, including a company card, is not allowed. The wording around this comes from a third-party source, so treat it as unofficial until the service says it in its own pages.

A withdrawal is technically possible in two cases, and the rules are different. If you are using the bot only, you can return the balance to the ruble payment method if the card was issued within 30 days, has no completed transactions, and has not been used or accepted anywhere. Any successful payment, even a small one, blocks the return. The issuance fee and commissions are excluded from the return, and a card that was issued and first topped up in crypto is not eligible for a return at all. Returns are paid within 14 working days, and may be held up to 30 working days on suspicion of fraud. If you are a web-account user, the return goes to the original crypto wallet minus network fees, and KYC is required.

The asymmetry is the point. The card is built to be topped up, used, and not returned.

Paying with it every day

All three cards are virtual Visa cards in USD. They can be used anywhere a Visa card is accepted online. The two higher tiers also work with Apple Pay and Google Pay, although the binding process is not self-service: you ask a manager, in working hours, for a confirmation code, and the manager sends it. There is no in-app button.

The list of things the card refuses is longer than the list of things it allows. Payments to merchants linked to Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and other Visa- or Mastercard-restricted countries are blocked. Payments in rubles and hryvnias are blocked. Adult services, casinos and betting are blocked. The terms reserve the right to block the card for any of these violations “without refund” — that is the literal phrase. So the card can be frozen at the moment it does the one thing you opened it to do, and the balance is forfeit.

There is no cashback programme. The portal’s hero label advertises a referral bonus of $2 per invited user, and that is the only reward stated.

There is no standalone app. The whole product is a Telegram bot; the website is a landing page. There are no App Store or Google Play ratings, because there is nothing to rate.

For disputes, the official route is Telegram support or the email address [email protected]. A manager replies within five minutes during support hours, and the bot itself runs at any time. A refund is processed within 14 working days, and may be held up to 30 working days on suspicion of fraud or while a bank review is in progress. There is no refund for a successful payment — once the merchant has the money, you do not get it back through Chocopay. A third-party source lists a $5 charge for raising a refund request, but that figure is unofficial and not confirmed by Chocopay. The chargeback process is not described in the public pages, so the practical path for a dispute is “ask the bot, hope the merchant cooperates, and accept that a successful payment is final.”

The card’s value in everyday use is narrow. It works for the cases its marketing names — paying for an AI subscription, paying for an online service that accepts a foreign-issued Visa — and it stops working the moment a merchant sees the issuing country, runs an Address Verification Service check that the card cannot pass, or applies extra scrutiny to a prepaid BIN. Decline rates on foreign prepaid cards are higher than on domestic debit cards, and the unofficial $0.75 decline fee means a bad day of card trials can cost more than a month’s subscription.

What can go wrong

The card has been around long enough that the failure modes are mostly visible from the public pages, the absence of information on the public pages, and the few reviews that exist.

The company behind Chocopay is CYPHER GOODS WHOLESALERS LLC, registered in Dubai under number 1049902. The registered office is Office No. 301A, Dubai Investment Properties (LLC), Al Raqqa, Dubai. The cards are described as “of foreign banks” but the issuing bank and any licences are not named. A third-party source says there is no public financial licence on file for the company, but that is unofficial and not confirmed by Chocopay. The practical reading: a Dubai-registered company is selling USD-denominated Visa cards in a Telegram bot without naming the bank that stands behind the BIN. The BIN, the issuer’s identification number at the start of the card, is what merchants see first; if the issuer is not in the public record, you cannot easily verify it.

There is no Trustpilot page. The only review aggregator with a score notes 3.8 out of 5 from 25 reviews and flags the data as “not enough.” A vc.ru ranking in 2026 notes that it could not confirm Chocopay works for a Claude subscription payment; that is a single data point and not a verdict, but it is the kind of evidence that says the card is not as universal as the marketing implies.

Security is custodial, which is the same as saying the operator holds your balance. The card is described as a “virtual card for international purchases for a set period” — that is a prepaid card, not a bank account, and the balance is held by the company. The card freezes after expiry or after many declines on an empty balance; the freeze can be lifted in the bot. A card may be cancelled after 30 days of inactivity. Two-factor authentication and self-custody options are not stated. The service’s liability is capped at the last month’s commission, with a maximum of $100, which is a very small ceiling for the loss of a loaded balance.

The major category-level risks apply here as well. Crypto transfers are irreversible, so a deposit sent on a network Chocopay does not support, or to an address of the wrong network, can be lost. The public pages do not list supported networks, which raises the chance of that error. Stablecoins can depeg, and a depeg during a top-up window means you bought fewer dollars than the screen showed. The issuing bank and any payment-services licence are not named, so the protections that come with a regulated e-money institution — segregated client funds, deposit-style guarantees, an external dispute body — are not on the table unless you go and find them yourself.

Programme closures are a real risk for any card sold by a single brand on top of someone else’s licence. Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022 and the FTX US debit card was wound down by its issuer. In 2018, Visa suspended WaveCrest in Europe, closing every WaveCrest-issued Visa programme. Neither of those events is about Chocopay, but they are the template: a card you can use today can be unusable in a month, and the only thing you can do is spend or withdraw the balance before the deadline.

The Telegram-only support is a risk on its own. A bot does not have a paper trail you can take to a regulator, and the manager on the other side is in MSK working hours, not in your timezone.

What to take instead

Chocopay is one option among several virtual cards sold in Russian and English. Three are worth comparing.

Ape Wallet is closer to Chocopay in spirit: a Russian-facing service sold to people who want to pay for AI and subscriptions, with a Telegram-style flow. Its marks are higher on cost transparency (the fee is shown before you confirm) and the Apple/Google Pay card option, but lower on clarity about the issuing country and the network.

MaxSwap is the higher-cost alternative with a published fee schedule: top-up 4.5% plus $1, transaction 0.25 USD plus 0.4%. The published list of supported coins is unusually long. The issue price of roughly $77.125 is the most expensive of the four, and the FX rate is not published.

AnoCard has the most flexible product — reloadable and one-time virtual cards from several BINs, picked in a web dashboard — and the strongest referral programme. It is also the least verifiable in this round: the public page was down at the time of writing, so the BIN, network and currency details should be confirmed in the SORN dashboard before any top-up.

If you only need a virtual USD Visa for AI and subscription payments, Chocopay is the cheapest to issue; if you need predictable per-transaction fees, MaxSwap is the only one that names them; if you need BIN-shopping and a web dashboard, AnoCard is the option. The reader who is comparing all four on trust will notice that none of the four names a public financial licence, and that is a feature of the niche, not of any one card.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend Chocopay to a user who already lives inside Telegram, has a specific need to pay for an AI subscription or a similar USD-denominated online service that does not accept local bank cards, and is comfortable with the card’s limits: no ATM, no physical card, no refund after a successful payment, and a non-named issuing bank. For that reader, the $6 issue fee on the Subscriptions and AI tariff is a cheap way to test the service, and the 3-month lifetime is short enough that any mistake is a small one.

I would not recommend it to a reader who needs a card for travel, who needs a physical card, who needs a transparent per-transaction fee, or who needs the protections of a regulated e-money institution. I would also not recommend it to a reader who plans to fund it from rubles in significant volume and is not ready to absorb the bot’s rate, or to a reader who plans to use it for any merchant that may be linked to Russia or Ukraine, because the card’s own terms can refuse the payment. If any of those constraints sound like you, look at MaxSwap for a published fee schedule, at AnoCard if the dashboard is back up, or at an EMI-issued card if you can pass KYC and want segregated client funds.

The single most useful thing a reader can do before signing up is to send the bot a message and ask, in Russian, which coins and which networks it accepts, and then compare that answer with what their own wallet can send. The 3-9% commission is bad; sending USDT on a network the bot does not recognise is worse.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Chocopay card?

A virtual Visa card sold in a Telegram bot by a Dubai-registered company, CYPHER GOODS WHOLESALERS LLC. It is prepaid and USD-denominated, and it is marketed at users who want to pay for AI tools and online subscriptions that do not accept local bank cards.

How does the Chocopay card work?

You top up the card’s USD balance with rubles (Russian bank cards or SBP) or with cryptocurrency, and then spend that balance online or through Apple Pay or Google Pay on the two higher tiers. It is prepaid, so it cannot overdraw.

Is Chocopay a bank?

No. It is a company registered in Dubai. The terms describe the cards as “of foreign banks,” but the issuing bank and any licences are not named in the public pages.

Who owns Chocopay?

The company is CYPHER GOODS WHOLESALERS LLC, registration number 1049902, Office No. 301A, Dubai Investment Properties (LLC), Al Raqqa, Dubai. The individual owners are not listed on the public pages.

Is the Chocopay card available in my country?

The terms do not set a country test. The block is at the merchant level: payments to merchants linked to restricted countries (including Russia and Ukraine) and in rubles or hryvnias are prohibited. If your subscription is billed by a Russian or Ukrainian company, the card will refuse it.

How do I get the Chocopay card?

Open the Chocopay Telegram bot, read the rules, choose one of three tariffs (Subscriptions and AI, Universal or Travel), pay the issue fee, and top up. The marketing says this takes “a couple of minutes.” The terms allow the service to request information within two calendar days and to run automated or manual checks.

Does the Chocopay card require KYC?

Marketing says no. The terms allow the service to ask for information and to run checks from five minutes (automated) to three to ten working days (complex). A web-account refund requires KYC, and a return on a bot-only account is restricted to cards issued within 30 days, with no completed transactions.

How do I top up the Chocopay card?

From a Russian bank card or by SBP in rubles, minimum $15, or with cryptocurrency, minimum $30. The crypto commission is 3-9%, and the specific coins and networks are not listed on the public pages.

Can I withdraw money from the Chocopay card?

Only under narrow conditions. A bot-only user can return the balance to the ruble payment method if the card was issued within 30 days, has no completed transactions, has not been used or accepted, and was not first topped up in crypto. A web-account user can return the balance to the original crypto wallet minus network fees, after KYC.

Is the Chocopay card safe?

It is a prepaid card, not a bank account. The operator holds the balance, the issuing bank is not named, and the public pages do not describe segregated client funds or a deposit guarantee. The main safety practices are the same as for any Telegram product: confirm the bot’s username before paying, never send crypto to a network the support team has not named in writing, and assume that a successful payment is final.

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