Cambodia Visa Credit Card Declined? Fixes for US Travelers

The fast fix order — clear it in under five minutes

You do not need to diagnose the exact cause to fix it. Run this sequence in order and stop as soon as the payment goes through. Most Americans clear a decline before they reach step three.

• Check your phone first. Look for a fraud alert text, a banking-app push notification, or an email asking you to confirm the charge. Approve it. This alone clears most declines.
• Wait sixty seconds, then retry once. The approval needs a moment to propagate through the bank before the charge will go through. Retrying instantly can re-trip the same block.
• Confirm the billing address. Enter the ZIP code and street number exactly as they appear on your card statement, not your travel or hotel address. A single digit off triggers an AVS decline.
• Complete the verification step. If a Verified by Visa, Mastercard SecureCode, or one-time-passcode screen appears, turn off any pop-up blocker and enter the six-digit code your bank texts you.
• Try a different card. If you have a second card from a different bank, use it. A travel-focused credit card is far less likely to fraud-flag a foreign charge than a rarely used debit card.
• Switch to a digital wallet. If raw card entry keeps failing, pay with PayPal, Apple Pay, or Google Pay — the wallet token routes around most raw-card declines.

The one thing not to do is hammer the retry button. Five or six rapid attempts on the same card look like card-testing fraud to the bank, which triggers a velocity block that can lock the card for the rest of the day. Worse, each blocked attempt can leave a temporary authorization hold on your account — money that is not actually charged but shows as pending and can look alarming if you do not know what it is.

Those pending authorizations are harmless and drop off on their own, usually within a few business days, because a declined charge is never captured. If you see several pending lines after a string of failed attempts and you want to understand exactly what settled versus what will reverse, our explainer on Cambodia eVisa foreign transaction fees and statement charges covers how the holds read on a US statement.

Bank-by-bank notes for US cardholders

Every US issuer handles a foreign online charge a little differently. Here is what to expect from the big ones, and the single fastest action for each. In every case, the fraud-alert text is faster than calling — reply to it before you dial.

Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citi all send an instant fraud-alert text or app notification on an unfamiliar foreign charge. Reply YES (or tap approve in the app), wait a minute, and retry. Their apps also let you confirm a blocked transaction directly in the activity feed if the text never arrives. You rarely need to call any of the four.

Capital One is one of the most travel-friendly issuers and frequently lets a foreign charge through with no friction at all — but when it does block one, the in-app approval is instant. American Express is similar: Amex tends to approve cleanly, and when it does flag, the Amex app push notification clears it in one tap. Discover is accepted at checkout, but is the least likely of the major networks to be accepted by foreign merchants in general, so if Discover keeps failing, switch networks rather than fighting it.

Credit-union and smaller-bank debit cards are the most common true blocks. Many ship with international online purchases disabled by default as a security setting, and there is no fraud text to approve because the transaction was rejected by policy, not flagged by a model. For these, you must call the credit union or use the app to enable international or online transactions before the charge will ever go through. If your only card is a credit-union debit card, do this step before you reach checkout.

One pattern worth knowing: a prepaid or gift Visa or Mastercard often fails on the verification step because it has no billing address attached for the AVS check to match. If that is the only card you have, a digital wallet is the cleaner path. Our PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay guide for Americans covers setting one up in a couple of minutes so you can finish the payment without hunting for another card.

When every card on your wallet fails

Occasionally two or three cards in a row decline and it feels like the checkout itself is broken. It is almost never the checkout. When several different cards fail in quick succession, the cause is usually one of three things, and each has a clean answer.

First, you may have triggered a velocity block on the device or session, not on any one card. Rapid repeated attempts — even across different cards — can make the payment processor cautious for a short window. The fix is simple: stop, wait fifteen to twenty minutes, close the tab, and come back fresh. The application is saved; you are not starting over.

Second, every card you tried may share the same billing address problem. If you recently moved and have not updated your address with any of your banks, all of your cards will fail the same AVS check for the same reason. Pull up a recent statement, find the billing address your bank actually has on file, and enter that exactly — even if it is your old place.

Third, and the cleanest escape hatch, is to stop using raw card numbers entirely and pay through a digital wallet. PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay tokenize the transaction, which means the bank sees a wallet it already trusts rather than a raw foreign card-not-present charge, and the fraud model relaxes. This single switch clears the majority of stubborn multi-card declines. If you would rather sort the underlying card block once and for all, our guide on clearing a payment decline for US cardholders walks through the bank-side settings to change.

If you have run all of that and still cannot pay, reach out to US-timezone support rather than retrying a tenth time. The application is held safely while you sort the payment, and there is no penalty for taking an hour to clear a bank block. The eVisa is still approved in 3 business days once the payment lands, so a short delay at checkout does not move your timeline if you are applying with any reasonable lead time.

Putting it together — the calm checklist

A declined card on the Cambodia eVisa is the least scary problem in the whole application, because the cause is almost always sitting in a notification on your own phone. Approve the alert, confirm your billing address, retry once, and you are through. The card was never the problem; the bank was just being careful with an unfamiliar charge.

The shape of the whole thing is still simple: Tourist eVisa $80 USD, Business eVisa $90 USD, both delivered as a printable PDF by email, both approved in 3 business days, both with free resubmission if Immigration flags a correction and US-timezone support if the payment sticks. For the complete picture, our guide to the Cambodia visa for US citizens walks through eligibility, documents, and timing end to end. Once the charge clears, you are back on the standard timeline. If you want to confirm which cards and wallets sail through cleanest before you retry, the full payment methods for Americans guide ranks them.

Next steps and related reading for Americans: head back to apply for your Cambodia eVisa once your bank has approved the charge, clear a stubborn bank fraud hold if the alert never arrived, read the foreign transaction fees explainer so the pending holds on your statement make sense, and set up PayPal, Apple Pay, or Google Pay as a backup so a raw-card decline never stops you twice.