A useful Argentine Mastercard if you live in Argentina, and a closed door almost everywhere else
Available in USBelo is an Argentine crypto app that issues a Mastercard prepaid card in pesos or crypto. The card itself is free to issue, free to maintain and free to ship, and on a quiet day it does what a prepaid Mastercard should do: pay at shops, withdraw cash at an ATM, sit in Google Pay. The problem is geography. Belo lets you open an account in twelve Latin American countries, but the Mastercard is reserved for people with an Argentine ID document and an Argentine delivery address. If you live in Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile or any of the other eight supported countries, the account opens but the card stays out of reach.
I have spent time with Belo’s public pages, the help centre, the dispute procedure and the third-party reporting that exists around the brand. This review walks through what the card actually does, what it costs in the situations you will run into, and where the gaps are. If you are an Argentine resident with a DNI, Belo is one of the cheaper prepaid Mastercards on the market, and you may not need to look further. If you are anywhere else, read the alternatives section before you download the app.
The conditions described here are current as of October 28, 2026.
Verdict
Belo’s total score is 5.5 out of 10. That is not a verdict against the card, it is a verdict against its reach. The card itself is competent: free to issue, free to maintain, with a sensible 3% ATM fee and a 0.30 USDT floor on international payments. The deductions come from how narrow eligibility is and from how little Belo publishes about its own setup.
| Criterion | Mark | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Who can get it | 2 / 10 | Belo opens accounts in 12 countries but issues the Mastercard only to people with an Argentine ID and an Argentine delivery address. For the other 11 countries the card is marked unavailable. |
| Cost | 8 / 10 | Issue, shipping and maintenance are all 0. A physical replacement is 2.50 USDT, international payments carry a 0.30 USDT minimum, ATM withdrawals are 3% with a 0.50 USDT floor. There is no monthly fee. |
| Top-up options | 5 / 10 | The card needs a balance in the belo account, in pesos or crypto with a debit order you can pick. The supported coins and networks are not listed on the pages I read, which makes the “crypto” side hard to plan around. |
| Reliability and complaints | 5 / 10 | The card-issuing bank is not named on the public pages. The processor is Pomelo. Unofficial sources say Belo is registered with Argentina’s CNV as a crypto asset service provider. App Store reviews in Brazil flag problems with international transfers and weak support. |
| Everyday use | 8 / 10 | Virtual and physical Mastercard, Google Pay supported, ATM access in Argentina, withdrawals at participating merchants. Apple Pay is not mentioned. |
| Total | 5.5 / 10 |
The audience that fits Belo is narrow and clearly defined: Argentine residents with an Argentine ID. For them the card is a free, low-friction prepaid Mastercard backed by crypto. For anyone else, the right move is to compare alternatives, which I cover further down.
Will they give you the card
This is the section you should read first, because the eligibility gap is what decides whether Belo is worth your time at all.
Belo lets you open an account in twelve countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela. The rule is straightforward: you need an ID document issued by one of those countries. If you have a Brazilian CPF, a Mexican INE, a Colombian cédula, you can create an account and pass identity verification.
The Mastercard is a different story. Belo only issues the card to people with an Argentine ID, either a DNI or an Argentine passport, and to addresses inside Argentina. For the other eleven countries the card is shown as unavailable. The split is by document type and by delivery address, not by citizenship in the abstract, so the practical filter is: Argentine ID, Argentine address. There is no mention of a virtual-only fallback for non-Argentine accounts.
If you fall outside that filter, the rest of this review still describes what the card does, but you should not expect to be issued one. The alternatives section lists options that take a wider set of countries.
A few things the public pages do not say and that you should keep in mind before you start:
- The card-issuing bank is not named on the pages I read. The card is described as a “tarjeta prepaga local” with international validity, and the dispute procedure names the processor as Pomelo, but the BIN sponsor and licence are not stated.
- The minimum age, proof of address and proof of funds origin are not stated on the eligibility pages, except that proof of address and proof of funds origin are needed to raise limits.
- What happens if you move out of Argentina after the card is issued is not stated.
How to get it
If you have an Argentine DNI or passport, the path through the app is the standard Argentine fintech flow. Belo’s public help pages describe it in four moves: open an account, verify with your ID, request the card in the “Tarjetas” section of the app, and activate the physical card when it arrives.
Identity verification is strict in a way that is worth understanding. Belo’s help page spells out that only the documents listed for your country will be accepted, and anything not on the list is auto-rejected. For Argentina, that means DNI, foreigner’s national ID or passport. The page does not list proof of address or proof of funds origin on the standard flow; both come up only when you want to raise the card’s limits.
The card itself comes in two forms: a virtual card and a physical card. Belo describes it as a Mastercard prepaid card (“tarjeta prepaga local”) that works locally and internationally, and the balance it draws on is the belo account, in pesos or in crypto with a debit order you can pick.
Delivery is to an Argentine address only. Belo’s help centre says shipping takes “approximately 3 business days” from request to arrival, and that shipping is free. If you lose the physical card, a replacement costs 2.50 USDT, which is one of the few fees on the card and is charged in USDT rather than pesos. The replacement rule is one reason to keep the virtual card active even when the plastic is in your wallet.
A few practical points that the help pages do not cover:
- Whether the app supports in-app card activation in all cases is not stated.
- Whether you can have more than one physical card is not stated.
- What happens to the balance on account closure is not stated.
What it really costs: Belo card fees
The cost picture is the strongest part of Belo. The card is free to issue, free to ship and free to maintain, and the only fees that show up are at the edges: when you replace a lost physical card, when you spend in a foreign currency, and when you take cash out of an ATM. Even those fees are modest by prepaid-Mastercard standards.
| Fee or limit | Amount |
|---|---|
| Card issuance | 0 |
| Shipping | 0 |
| Monthly maintenance | 0 |
| Physical card replacement | 2.50 USDT |
| International transaction minimum | 0.30 USDT (0.40 USDT at selected merchants) |
| ATM withdrawal (Argentina) | 3%, minimum 0.50 USDT |
| Daily purchase limit (default) | ARS 20,000,000 (editable in the app) |
| Consolidated monthly cap | 5,000 USDT (physical + virtual) |
| Consolidated annual cap | 50,000 USDT (physical + virtual) |
| Free ATM allowance | not stated |
Two numbers that you will not find on the cost pages but that matter in practice: the spread on crypto-to-peso conversion and the percentage FX fee on international payments are not stated. That does not mean the fees are zero, it means Belo does not publish them. Treat any estimate of what a foreign-currency payment will actually cost as something to check on the first transaction, not on the assumption page.
Three everyday situations
Paying for a coffee in Buenos Aires with pesos in the balance. No issuance fee, no monthly fee, no per-tap fee on a domestic payment. The cost is the conversion spread if you were holding crypto and converted to pesos at the moment of payment, which is one reason the debit order matters.
Paying for a hotel in Miami with a crypto balance. The transaction settles in USD, the same as any Argentine-issued card used abroad. Foreign-currency taxes apply, and Belo adds a minimum cost of 0.30 USDT on international transactions, or 0.40 USDT at selected merchants. The percentage FX fee is not stated, so the only way to know the real number is to test a small charge first.
Taking out cash at an ATM in Argentina. 3% of the amount, with a 0.50 USDT minimum. There is no free allowance. A small withdrawal is dominated by the floor, so if you take out the equivalent of USD 5 you pay USD 0.50, and if you take out USD 100 you pay USD 3.
What the limits look like in practice
The default daily purchase limit is ARS 20,000,000 and is editable in the app. The monthly and annual caps are stated in USDT: 5,000 USDT per month and 50,000 USDT per year across the physical and virtual cards combined. Raising any of these requires you to upload proof of address and proof of funds origin in your profile. The ATM withdrawal limit is not stated separately from the daily purchase limit, which is one of the things I would ask support about before relying on the card for cash.
There is no monthly maintenance fee and no inactivity fee in the public material. There is also no second tier of card: Belo offers one card per user, in virtual and physical form, and any improvement comes from raising the limits, not from upgrading the card.
Top up and funding
Funding the card means funding the belo account, because the card spends from that balance. Belo’s help pages are consistent on this point: the card needs funds in your belo account, in pesos or in crypto, with the order of debit selectable. The pages I read do not list which coins or which networks are accepted for a top-up, and the deposit fees, minimums and fiat on-ramp options are also not stated on the card pages. That is a real gap: if you are buying the card precisely because it spends crypto, the rest of the experience depends on choices that Belo has not published on the card’s own pages.
The practical interpretation is that the app shows the supported coins and networks at the deposit screen, and that anything not on the list will not arrive. Stablecoins are the most common funding route for cards of this type, and the category background section below covers the networks they usually travel on. The risk to be aware of is the standard crypto-deposit risk: if you send a coin on a network Belo does not support, or to an address generated for a different network, the transfer is irreversible and recovery depends on the support team.
Withdrawal works the other way. Cash comes out of ATMs in Argentina at the 3% / 0.50 USDT minimum rate, and at participating merchants. The virtual card can be deleted in seconds from the app, which is useful for one-off online purchases. What happens to the remaining balance when the account is closed is not stated.
Paying with it every day
For an Argentine user, the day-to-day experience is the most polished part of the product. Belo offers a virtual and a physical Mastercard prepaid card, and the physical card works at point-of-sale and at ATMs across Argentina. The virtual card is the one to keep handy for online purchases and for deleting between uses.
Mobile wallet support is partial. Google Pay is confirmed, and you can also save the card in Mercado Pago, which is how many Argentine cardholders end up tapping to pay anyway. Apple Pay is not mentioned anywhere in the help pages I read, which is a meaningful gap for iPhone users. If Apple Pay is the way you usually pay, that is a reason to look at the alternatives.
Refunds and disputes are described in the help centre, and the timing is worth keeping in mind:
- Refunds for rejected or reported purchases are credited in pesos within 8 to 30 calendar days.
- An unrecognised-charge dispute can take 30 to 120 days.
- A controversy claim waits 31 days from the transaction before being processed.
- Claims must be filed within 90 days.
- Escalation goes to the processor Pomelo, then to Mastercard.
A blocked merchant category list is not stated, and rewards are not stated on the official pages. Third-party reporting from 2026 (Rankia) describes crypto cashback of up to 21%, and an earlier interview with Belo’s CEO (The Fintech Times, undated) describes a range of 2% to 21%. I am treating both as unofficial until Belo publishes the terms on its own pages, and I would not pick the card on the assumption that any specific cashback rate will apply to your account.
The app itself, the in-app help centre, the support email and the help language are not described in detail in the public material, and support hours are not stated.
What can go wrong
The risks worth thinking about fall into three buckets: company and licence, complaints, and the usual prepaid-card frictions.
Company and licence. Belo does not name the card-issuing bank on the public pages I read, and the card is described as a “tarjeta prepaga local” with international validity. The dispute procedure names the processor as Pomelo, but the BIN sponsor and the licence under which the card is issued are not stated. A 2026 third-party source (Rankia) says Belo is registered as a crypto asset service provider with Argentina’s CNV; this is unofficial and not confirmed by Belo’s own pages. The category background section explains why the issuer matters even when the brand is well known: the card programme lives with the issuer, and if the issuer’s licence changes, the card changes with it.
Complaints. I did not find a Trustpilot or Google Play rating for Belo, and a focused search did not turn up Reddit or Trustpilot threads about the Belo Mastercard specifically. The most visible signal is the App Store reviews of the Belo app, summarised in a third-party paid report (Kimola, undated): users mention problems with international transfers, delayed transactions, weak support and account verification. These are secondhand summaries of Brazilian App Store reviews, so I am treating them as a directional signal rather than a final count.
Security and support. The card has the basics: report a lost or stolen physical card in the app to deactivate it in seconds, pause and resume the card, set a 4-digit PIN for ATMs in the app. Two-factor authentication and insurance are not stated on the card pages. Support is described as an in-app help centre plus an email, in Spanish, with no published hours.
Stablecoin and network risk. Because the card spends from a balance, and that balance is funded by crypto on one side or pesos on the other, the usual risks of holding a stablecoin apply. The category background covers depegs, irreversible transfers and the fact that a deposit sent on a network Belo does not support is effectively lost.
Limit risk. The default daily purchase limit of ARS 20,000,000 is editable, and the consolidated monthly and annual caps in USDT are clear. If you need to spend more, the path is to upload proof of address and proof of funds origin, which the help pages do not describe in detail.
Card programme risk. Cards are not permanent products. The category background section below covers past programmes that were closed by their networks (FTX, WaveCrest) and the typical sequence: a notice period, then spending and loading stop, then a window to withdraw the balance.
What to take instead
If you are an Argentine resident with an Argentine ID, the only reason to look elsewhere is if you specifically need a feature Belo does not offer, such as Apple Pay or a tiered cashback scheme. If you are not in that group, the alternatives below take a wider set of countries, with the trade-offs that usually come with a broader product.
Bitrefill, scored 6.8 / 10. A virtual and physical Visa card funded by crypto. The card page says it is free through the app, with an inactivity fee after 12 months of no spending or cash-out. Country list is not stated; the terms say access is “subject to eligibility criteria” and that “further eligibility requirements, established and verified by our partners, shall apply.” Funding covers Bitcoin, Lightning, Ethereum, USDC, USDT, Solana, BASE, Polygon, Li.Finance, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Visa and MasterCard, with SEPA also supported per the terms. The published reward is 2% total cashback with no cap: 1% on each crypto deposit and 1% on each purchase. The card currency is implied as EUR. Conversion spread and FX fees are not stated in detail. Good fit if you want a Euro-denominated card and a published 2% back.
UPay, scored 6.1 / 10. A wallet that supports virtual and physical cards, personal and business, in USD, EUR, AED and other currencies, with wallet top-ups in BTC, ETH, USDT and USDC. Country list is not stated; the page says UPay does not serve residents of certain countries, that the list may change, and that the KYC partner accepts only ID documents issued by the same country as the user’s account. The site claims support in 180+ countries. Card cost and fee numbers are not stated on the card page. Cashback is not stated on the card page; the home page lists an “Earn While You Sleep” product, but only the title. Good fit if you want a multi-currency card and you are comfortable with a published fee page that has gaps.
Kemy, scored 6.0 / 10. Unlimited virtual cards and one physical Mastercard, in 190+ countries, with a “few restrictions” caveat that you check at sign-up. Pricing is the most detailed of the three: virtual cards cost $15 to issue and are valid for three years, with a $2 per month fee; the physical Mastercard costs $250 (DHL Express included), is valid for three years and is limited to one per user, with a $10 per month fee. Top-up is $1.5 under $100 or 1.25% from $100 (minimum $5 on the virtual, $10 on the physical); transaction fee on the virtual is 3.5% plus $1, and failed transactions cost $0.80. Funding covers USDT and USDC “on the main networks” plus BTC, ETH and SOL via on-ramp, and fiat via mobile money and virtual bank accounts. The published main-account deposit fee is 8% in one place and 5% in another, which is a conflict I would want resolved before loading significant funds. Cashback is not mentioned. Good fit if you need a high-spending virtual card and you can absorb the monthly fees.
A few practical differences across the three:
- Networks. Bitrefill is Visa, Kemy is Mastercard on the physical card with Visa shown on virtual mockups, UPay does not name the network.
- Geography. Bitrefill and UPay publish the broadest reach; Kemy publishes 190+ countries with eligibility checked at sign-up. All three require KYC.
- Pricing transparency. Bitrefill is light on detail but publishes a reward rate. UPay leaves most numbers unstated. Kemy is the most detailed and also the most expensive in absolute terms.
Who I would recommend it to
I would recommend Belo to an Argentine resident with an Argentine ID who wants a free, low-friction prepaid Mastercard that can be funded from a crypto balance, used in Google Pay, and topped up with pesos when needed. For that user the card does what it says on the tin, and the only friction worth checking ahead of time is whether Apple Pay matters to you (it is not mentioned), and whether the default caps are high enough.
I would not recommend Belo to anyone outside Argentina. The account may open, but the Mastercard is unavailable, and that is the entire point of the product. If you live in Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile or any of the other supported countries, Bitrefill, UPay or Kemy are more honest starting points.
I would also pause before recommending Belo to a user whose main reason to get the card is cashback. The published reward on Belo’s own pages is not stated, and the third-party numbers (up to 21% per Rankia in 2026, and 2% to 21% in an earlier CEO interview) are unofficial. If cashback is the deciding factor, Bitrefill’s published 2% with no cap is the more useful comparison.
Finally, the issuer is not named on the public pages. That is not unique to Belo, and it does not mean the card is unsafe, but it does mean a careful user should ask support to confirm the issuing bank, the licence, and the dispute path before loading a large balance.
Frequently asked questions
What is Belo card?
Belo card is a Mastercard prepaid card issued from the Belo crypto app in Argentina. It is offered as a virtual card and a physical card, it is denominated in Argentine pesos or in crypto from your belo balance, and the card itself is free to issue, ship and maintain. The card-issuing bank is not named on Belo’s public pages; the processor named in the dispute procedure is Pomelo.
How does Belo card work?
You open a belo account, pass identity verification with an accepted ID document, and request the card in the “Tarjetas” section of the app. The virtual card is available immediately, the physical card ships to an Argentine address. The card spends from your belo balance, in pesos or in crypto, with the debit order you choose.
Is Belo a bank?
Belo is not described as a bank on its public pages. The card is described as a Mastercard prepaid card (“tarjeta prepaga local”) with international validity, and the issuing bank is not named. A 2026 third-party source (Rankia) says Belo is registered as a crypto asset service provider with Argentina’s CNV; that registration is unofficial and not confirmed by Belo’s own pages.
Who owns Belo?
Belo does not publish its ownership and corporate structure on its public pages. If you see ownership claims elsewhere, treat them as unconfirmed unless Belo itself publishes them.
Is Belo card available in my country?
The account can be opened in twelve countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela, with an ID document issued in one of those countries. The Mastercard is issued only to people with an Argentine ID and an Argentine delivery address. For the other eleven countries the card is marked unavailable.
How do I get Belo card?
If you are eligible, the path is: open an account, verify your identity with an accepted ID, request the card in the “Tarjetas” section, and activate the physical card on arrival. Only the ID documents listed for your country are accepted; unlisted documents are auto-rejected. Proof of address and proof of funds origin are needed only to raise the card’s limits.
How do I top up Belo card?
You top up the belo account, not the card directly, and the card spends from that balance. The help pages say the balance can be held in pesos or in crypto, with the order of debit selectable. The specific coins and networks accepted for a top-up, the deposit fees, the minimums and the fiat on-ramp options are not stated on the card pages I read.
How do I withdraw money from Belo?
Cash withdrawals are at ATMs in Argentina, with a 3% fee and a 0.50 USDT minimum, and at participating merchants. The PIN is set in the app. The ATM limit is not stated separately from the daily purchase limit.
Is Belo card safe?
Belo has the basic safeguards: report a lost or stolen card in the app to deactivate it in seconds, pause and resume the card, set a 4-digit PIN for ATMs. Two-factor authentication and insurance are not stated on the card pages, and the issuing bank is not named. The category background section below explains why the issuer matters: card programmes live with the issuer, and if the issuer’s licence changes, the card changes with it.
How do I delete my Belo account?
The public help pages describe deleting a virtual card in seconds from the app (“Eliminar”). Closing the account and withdrawing any remaining balance is not described in the public help centre. If you have a balance when you close the account, ask support in writing what the withdrawal path is before you delete the card.
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