Cambodia eVisa Payment Failed? Fix Card Declines for US Cardholders

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 the moment the payment goes through. Most Americans clear a failed payment before they reach step four.

• 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 failed payments.
• 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.
• Enable international transactions. If the card has never been used abroad and there was no fraud text, open your banking app and switch on international or online purchases, or call the number on the back of the card.
• 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 failure.
• 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.
• 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 payment that never succeeds is never captured. If you see several pending lines after a string of failed attempts and want to understand 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.

How to enable international transactions on your US card

If your payment fails with a flat "card not accepted" and no fraud text ever arrives, the cause is usually a setting rather than a fraud flag. Many US cards block foreign online purchases by default, and the bank rejects the charge silently by policy. The fix is to turn that setting on before you try again — and it takes about two minutes.

In your banking app, look under Card Settings, Security, or Controls for a toggle labeled something like "International transactions", "Foreign transactions", or "Online purchases". Switch it on, give it a minute to register, then return to the checkout and retry. Most major issuer apps — Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citi, Capital One — expose this toggle directly, and the change takes effect almost immediately.

Credit-union and smaller-bank debit cards are the most common true blocks here. A lot of them ship with international online purchases disabled as a standing security default, and some hide the toggle or only let you change it by phone. If your only card is a credit-union debit card, call the number on the back and ask them to enable international online transactions before you even reach the payment step — that single call clears the most stubborn "card not accepted" failures.

A quick note on prepaid and gift cards: 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, and many cannot be enabled for international use at all. If that is the only card you have, do not waste time toggling settings that do not exist — a digital wallet is the cleaner path, and the next sections cover it.

When every card and method fails

Occasionally two or three cards in a row fail 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, so 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 failures. Before you go further, it is also worth a thirty-second check that you are on the genuine checkout — our guide to paying safely and avoiding Cambodia visa scams shows what the real payment page should look like.

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 failed payment 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 or in a toggle in your banking app. Approve the alert, enable international transactions, confirm your billing address, retry once, and you are through. The card was never the real problem; the bank was just being careful with an unfamiliar charge.

The shape of the whole thing stays 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 bigger picture beyond checkout, our complete guide to the Cambodia visa for US citizens covers eligibility, documents, and timing in one place. If you want to retrace the steps before the payment screen, our step-by-step Cambodia eVisa application walkthrough for Americans covers the full form. And if you would rather confirm which cards and wallets sail through cleanest before you retry, the 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, read the full credit card decline fixes for US travelers if a specific card keeps failing, check the foreign transaction fees explainer so the pending holds on your statement make sense, and skim the safe-payment guide so you always know you are on the genuine checkout.