Curve Card Cash Wallet - Brute force withdrawal

This note assumes you are familiar with the Curve Card and how to handle the app to select cards and so on.

The Curve Card has an internal electronic wallet called Curve Cash. Rewards from Curve and refunds that they fail to route back to the correct card end up in this wallet. The currency in the wallet is Curve points or GBP. 100 Curve points is 1 GBP. So if your refund is in another currency then you are forced on an exchange.

The only way to withdraw money from this wallet is by using it for purchases like any other card in Curve that you have added. In 2021 or so Curve talked about making it possible to withdraw money from the wallet in some way, but that has not happened yet, so that is not an option.

The workaround is to top up some other financial service you can withdraw from and then do that.

To begin with you should do this on workdays, Monday 00:00 GMT to Friday 23:59 GMT to avoid getting extra fees for closed exchange markets. This applies to both Curve and Revolut and probably other services too. For Curve, check https://help.curve.com/en_us/how-does-curve-save-me-money-abroad-HyquHdnUu.

The services mentioned below also has minimum amounts to top up with. If you have less than the required amounts you are out of luck here and have to wait until you get enough.

Some services also don't allow users to specify decimals, which in this case is very important to withdraw everything from the wallet.

The comparisons here are made in GBP and SEK since the latter is the Swedish currency used when finding out these options. The options may differ for your currency.

Option 1 - Lunar - Minimum 100 SEK

Lunar offer users to top up their debit card in your local currency using other payment cards and from that you can withdraw money to your bank account.

The minimum amount is lower than Revolut as it is 100 SEK as of 2022-01. They permit specifying decimals.

They warn about transaction fees since they are a Danish bank. This does not apply to Sweden since they transfer from a Swedish bank. Maybe they do this in other countries too - if you are requested to specify a local bank account when trying to withdraw you know.

Option 2: Revolut - Minimum 10 GBP or 120 SEK

Revolut offer users to top up their debit card using other payment cards and you can even have different currencies on it. From Revolut you can withdraw to your regular bank account. There are however lower limits for how less you can top up. As of 2022-01 is the limit 10 GBP or 120 SEK.

Revolut allows users to specify decimals.

Check currency rates at https://www.revolut.com/currencies.

Revolut also has a quite messy price lists that may affect these kind of actions: https://www.revolut.com/our-pricing-plans.

The transfers from Revolut are international, so if you have a bank that charges for receiving transactions you may have to find a bank that does not if possible.

Option 3: Rocker - Minimum 100 SEK, no decimals

Rocker offer users to top up their debit card in SEK using other payment cards and from that you can withdraw money to your bank account or their savings account. If you are doing this before a weekend or banking holiday you should move the money to the savings account and then withdraw from that after the weekend or banking holiday.

The minimum amount to top up with is 100 SEK as of 2022-01.

There is however a big drawback with Rocker - they don't allow users to specify decimals, which is needed to withdraw everything from the wallet.

Option 4: PayPal - Not for Sweden and not cheap

One suggested solution is to top up a PayPal account with the wallet. This is however not possible in Sweden at least since PayPal redirect to the Trustly bank account withdrawal service or as a second option a bankgiro payment from a bank. There is no option to top up using payment cards in PayPal as of 2022-01.

If PayPal top up using payment cards is available in your country you should be bewared of PayPals exchange rates, which if you don't run your account in GBP will reduce the amount you receive.

Brute-force withdrawal

If your local currency is GBP then you already know if you have more GBP in the wallet than the minimum limits for the mentioned services then you can proceed directly with the top up of the service and the withdrawal of it. You can find exactly how much you have on the Curve Cash wallet and top up your service with it and then withdraw it from the service.

But what to do if your local currency not is GBP? Well, you need to figure out yourself the correct amount in your currency to top up with to exactly match the GBP amount in the wallet.

Start by searching on your search engine for:

<Your Curve Cash wallet amount> GBP to <your local currency, SEK for example>

You should get an inaccurate guess of how much to top up with.

Then use the Mastercard Currency Converter Calculator:
https://www.mastercard.us/en-us/personal/get-support/convert-currency.html

In the From field fill in your local currency (SEK for example).
In the Amount field fill in the GBP amount from the search engine.
In the To field fill in GBP.
In the Bank Fee field fill in 0.

Select the current date as the date of the transaction.

Check the conversion results and adjust the local currency amount until it exactly matches the GBP amount in your wallet.

Then use the local currency amount from the Amount field to request a top up your service of choice.

To be sure you really have withdrawn everything you can first try to withdraw a little more than what the calculator specified. For instance if you have 10 GBP in the wallet and that equals 100 SEK, try to top up your service with 100.50. If you get declined drop down to 100.40 and so on.

Do not be afraid to do too many retries - I got the payment declined more than ten times without being blocked.

There was a currency display bug in Curve when I tried this, the declined transactions in SEK was listed as GBP. So if I was declined 100.40 SEK then in the transaction list it said it declined 100.40 GBP. When a transaction finally succeeded it was listed in GBP with the text PENDING under and after an hour or so PENDING was replaced with the exact SEK amount I had withdrawn.

In my case the correct exact maximum amount to withdraw was the GBP amount specified in the Mastercard Currency Converter Calculator.