There are two main categories of denials, true declines and pre-declines.
True Declines
This is what you typically think of when your card declines.
When the business attempts to charge the card, our bank issuer, program manager, or Laso server receives it, but denies it. Some potential reasons are:
Insufficient balance
Transaction not allowed (gambling website, transfer of value, etc.)
Card/account is frozen
along with a few other possibilities.
Importantly, in this True Decline scenario, we will always show the attempt in your transaction list, along with the grey DENIED badge. We try to include as much as information as we can about why the decline happened, although sometimes we don't receive any info.
The important distinction here is that True Declines show in your transaction list, because either our server, or our vendor's server did receive a request from the business.
Pre-Declines
This is when a business declines your card, but no transaction shows up in your transaction list.
That means the business and/or their merchant processor (AKA card processor) looked at your attempted transaction, and decided it was too high-risk to even attempt. They did not send a request to our card whatsoever, they simply proactively deny it.
Generally, they have a risk score that looks at a multiple variables and generates a risk score. Some, not all, factors include:
It's a subscription service and prepaid cards churn at a higher rate.
They can't ascertain your location due to VPN, proxy, or some other reason.
The purchase can be abused for money laundering.
It's a new account on their service.
Your country is a higher risk for fraud.
Most of the time, this risk scoring happens at the merchant/card processor level, rather than the business.
That means:
+99% of the time, the error you see will be generic, something like "Your card is declined. Check with your card issuer.".
Any representative at the business won't have visibility into why it was declined. Just that it was declined.
These declines are much harder to resolve, because we don't receive any information about the decline, because nothing really "happened". The business/processor looked at the card, those other variables, and decided not to attempt.
If you hit a pre-decline, you just want to reduce your perceived risk to that business/processor. Our guide on how to best do that is here.
TL;DR
If decline shows in your transaction list, it should tell you how to fix the denial. Or let us know and we should be able to.
If decline doesn't show, the business is the one who declined it. Regardless of what the checkout page or company support says. Reduce your perceived risk to them with our troubleshooting guide.