Why Gaming Purchases Get Declined More Than You'd Expect

The merchant category problem
Certain merchant category codes — gaming, digital goods, ad platforms — get scored more conservatively by issuer fraud models simply due to statistical correlation with elevated fraud rates industry-wide.

How a crypto-funded card avoids it
A card that doesn't route through a traditional bank's fraud stack processes as a standard transaction on the merchant's end, without inheriting that category-level suspicion.

What it doesn't change
The storefront's own refund and dispute policy for digital goods still applies — this fixes the payment method, not the merchant's terms.