The commission is 5% of the face value of the voucher, applied identically at every size. A voucher with a face value of 200 settles at 190. There is no tier for larger amounts, no different figure for a first transaction, and no handling charge stacked on afterwards.
What the settlement rail itself takes — a blockchain network fee, a correspondent bank's deduction, PayPal's receiving fee — is charged by those parties rather than added as commission. The rates page states the figures as they stand.
That is the arithmetic. The more useful question is what the number is buying, because a percentage with nothing behind it is a toll.
A person on a telephone
Most of what the commission covers is human time, and it is spent in the least glamorous way imaginable. Every voucher is checked with its issuer before payment is released. That means an operator telephoning a merchant line and reading a code out, or querying it inside the issuer's redemption portal, waiting through a queue, and sometimes calling back the next day because the first agent escalated it. How a voucher is verified describes what that call establishes.
The interesting thing about this cost is that it does not scale with value. Ten vouchers of 20 mean ten conversations. One voucher of 200 means one. A flat percentage therefore charges the small transaction less than it costs to handle and the large transaction more. That is a deliberate trade: a single legible number that anyone can check with mental arithmetic, in exchange for a price that does not track cost precisely at either end. Tiered pricing would be fairer in one sense and harder to verify in another.
Risk that transfers with the code
When payment is released, the operator owns a code and nothing else. Prepaid vouchers carry no buyer protection running in that direction. There is no chargeback, no dispute window, no scheme rules to appeal to.
If the issuer subsequently voids the code — because the payment card used to buy it was stolen, because the original purchaser disputed the transaction, because the code was reported after the check was completed — the value disappears. The seller has already been paid. The loss stays where it fell.
Verification reduces that exposure substantially, which is the entire reason for doing it. It does not remove it. Some information reaches an issuer after the call has ended. A commission funds a loss rate that careful work can shrink and cannot eliminate, and any buyer who claims otherwise is describing a wish rather than a business.
Compliance, which is neither optional nor free
Every payout is preceded by sanctions screening, which is a subscription to data that has to be refreshed continuously rather than a single lookup. The compliance page covers what those checks are actually for. No KYC documents are required.
Behind that sits the unglamorous machinery: records kept for years, transaction monitoring, a qualified person reviewing the cases the rules flag, written policies that have to be maintained rather than filed, and the cost of the licensing process itself. The compliance page sets out the framework.
The virtual asset licence application is in progress and trading is not enabled.
The cost of moving the money
Every route out charges something. Blockchain networks charge a fee that rises with congestion and falls when the network is quiet. Banks charge for outbound international payments, and correspondent banks along a SWIFT route deduct their own. PayPal takes a percentage of what it receives, and adds a conversion spread where currencies differ. Choosing how you get paid goes through what each route costs and what each one does when it goes wrong.
What the commission is not
It is not a hidden rate spread. Where a payout is converted into crypto, a rate applies at the moment of release, and the sensible thing is to ask what reference that rate comes from and what quantity you will receive.
The distinction matters because a visible commission can be checked and an invisible margin cannot. A buyer quoting a percentage is telling you something you can verify against face value with a pocket calculator. A buyer quoting only a final number, without saying how it was reached, is asking you to trust a rate you have no way of inspecting. Get the figure you will receive, in the currency you will receive it, before you hand over the code.
When 5% is a bad deal for you
If you can spend the voucher where it was designed to be spent, spend it. A hundred is worth more than ninety-five, and no argument about convenience changes that.
Selling is the sensible route in narrower circumstances than people assume:
- The merchant you actually need does not accept the brand.
- The brand is not usable where you live, or the site you bought it for has closed its doors to your country.
- You need the value in a different form entirely — rent does not accept a scratch card.
- The voucher is drifting towards expiry, or towards a dormancy deduction. Several prepaid products reduce the balance once a voucher has sat unused for a period; the terms printed with your voucher say whether yours is one of them.
When a smaller number should worry you
Suppose someone offers you 98 for a voucher with a face value of 100. One of three things is true.
They have a genuinely cheaper cost base, which for a manual verification process is difficult and worth asking about. They are not verifying the voucher at all, which means they are carrying a risk they have not priced and will eventually stop trading, possibly mid-transaction with your code in hand. Or they never intended to pay: the offer exists to obtain the code, and the conversation ends the moment it is read out.
The last pattern is common enough that the generosity of an offer is itself a signal. A buyer who does not care what a code is worth is a buyer who is not planning to pay for it.
Risk does not evaporate because nobody prices it. It settles on whoever ends up holding the code, and in an unverified trade that is usually the seller.
What to check before accepting any quote, here or anywhere
- The exact amount you will receive, in the currency you will receive it.
- Who pays the network fee or the bank fee.
- What happens if the voucher verifies at a partial balance.
- What happens if it fails verification altogether, and whether the code is returned or destroyed.
- Whether you are asked to prove your identity before payment is released.
- Roughly how long the issuer check takes for your specific brand.
Six answers. They tell you more about a buyer than the percentage ever will. The step-by-step sequence behind them is in selling a prepaid voucher.