Visa Bans MCC 5815 for Meme Coin Purchases, Ending Credit Card Rewards

Visa Cuts Off the Rewards Loophole

Visa is moving to shut down a checkout workaround that let shoppers earn standard credit card rewards on meme coin purchases, a change that lands during the week of September 21 to 27. The targets are checkouts powered by Crossmint, a crypto payments infrastructure firm, which had allowed users of apps including Robinhood Wallet and Fomo to buy meme coins with credit cards through Apple Pay or Google Pay without completing a separate wallet address verification or know-your-customer flow. Transactions on both the Visa and Mastercard rails were coded as “digital goods media” — a category ordinarily reserved for e-books, movies and music — rather than as cryptocurrency purchases. That classification let buyers collect points and cash back on speculative token buys as if the spend were routine shopping.

The correction follows a challenge from Chase, which told the network that one Visa transaction had never been flagged as a cryptocurrency purchase, had been assigned the wrong merchant category code and should not have earned rewards; the bank then opened a formal case with Visa over the classification. The New York attorney general’s office has separately confirmed it is aware of and reviewing the matter. In correspondence with at least one industry participant, Visa stated that the digital goods media code is not appropriate for meme coin purchases. Processors, including Checkout.com, have been notified that the code will no longer be accepted for these transactions and have been given a grace period, expected to end next week. Purchases themselves are not banned — but going forward they must clear as crypto transactions and fall under Visa’s corresponding rules and restrictions.

MCC 5815 Meets the Crypto Codes

The mechanics hinge on merchant category codes, the four-digit identifiers that tell a card issuer what kind of business a charge belongs to; issuers key rewards eligibility, transaction screening and risk decisions off them. Visa’s own Merchant Data Standards Manual states that cryptocurrency purchases should ordinarily be processed under MCC 6012 or MCC 6051, accompanied by the indicators that mark a transaction as a crypto asset trade. MCC 5815, by contrast, is designated for books, movies, digital art, images and music delivered in electronic form — not for tokens issued on public layer 1 networks. The manual leaves little ambiguity about where a meme coin swipe belongs.

Crossmint had defended its routing by pointing to a 2025 SEC staff statement that described certain meme coins as akin to collectibles rather than securities — an argument about security status, not about card processing, and one Visa plainly does not accept on the payments side. The timing matters: banks came away empty-handed this week in their push for tighter restrictions on stablecoin rewards after the Clarity Act failed to advance in the Senate. Yet JPMorgan Chase still scored a narrower victory through the merchant-code fight, because the challenge that triggered Visa’s reversal came from its own card division rather than from legislation. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Bybit.

Card Rails Pull Crypto Into Line

Our reading of the primary record is that no new rulemaking was needed: the decisive document is Visa’s published merchant standards manual, whose existing text assigns crypto purchases to MCC 6012 or 6051 — the change is enforcement of that text. With the stablecoin side of Washington’s digital-currency agenda stalled, from the Clarity Act to central bank digital currency debates, payment networks are tightening the plumbing themselves. Meme coin card buying survives; the free rewards almost certainly do not, and issuers are likely to treat crypto spend as a distinct, higher-risk category from here.