CentroBill review: an adult gateway with no published rates

What is CentroBill?

CentroBill is a payment gateway that bills buyers on behalf of adult, dating, gaming, forex and other high-risk sites, so charges show up as CentroBill.com on the buyer’s card or bank statement. Buyers cancel memberships and ask questions through centrohelp.com. Depending on where the buyer lives, the contract is with CentroBill Ltd in Matawan, New Jersey, CentroBill Ltée in Montreal, or Eurobill Tech in Nicosia, formerly CentroBill (Cyprus).

For merchants, CentroBill quotes pricing case by case based on location, risk, volume and payment methods. It publishes no rate, reserve, payout delay or payout minimum. A reseller program pays referral fees on referred merchants’ volume for the life of their contract.

Is CentroBill trusted?

CentroBill has operated since 2011 and is PCI DSS Level 1, but it publishes no payment license and has described itself as a technology company that does no regulated activity. Its acquiring banks hold the licenses.

Its Trustpilot score is 1.1 out of 5 from 277 reviews, its BBB profile in Matawan is not accredited, and buyers on Reddit and Quora ask whether its charges are a scam. RatEx42, a watchlist of payment providers, rates it orange, its caution level. The testimonials on CentroBill’s home page talk about paying off debt and budgeting, which has nothing to do with payment processing.

CentroBill payment methods

CentroBill documents 39 methods: cards, Apple Pay and UnionPay, twenty bank transfers and debits, eight wallets, seven prepaid vouchers and UK carrier billing. Thirteen support recurring billing, including cards, Apple Pay, Skrill, ACH, SEPA debit, carrier billing and several European transfers such as iDEAL and Bancontact when backed by a SEPA account.

Outside Europe the list covers UPI in India, Zelle and ACH in the US, Interac and Interac e-Transfer in Canada, PayID in Australia, PayNow in Singapore, PromptPay in Thailand, InstaPay in the Philippines, and Alipay and WeChat in China. Paysafecard and Neosurf reach buyers without a card. Crypto, one-time only, includes bitcoin, ether, USDT on three networks, litecoin, monero and dogecoin. Countries under US OFAC sanctions are excluded.

What the CentroBill gateway does

A declined transaction is automatically retried on another acquiring bank, and routing picks the bank by location, transaction type, card BIN and past approval rates. A rebill optimizer retries failed renewals at a better time, and a card updater catches expiring cards.

Subscriptions can run weekly, monthly or yearly with paid or free trials, managed by CentroBill or rebilled by the merchant through a stored payment token. One-click payments, cross-sales, Ethoca, Verifi and RDR alerts and 3-D Secure are included. Suspicious customers are escalated in the merchant portal with a recommended action: block, credit or mark as trusted. Merchants can also push payouts to a card, a performer’s for example, without storing card data.

Setting up CentroBill

CentroBill offers four integrations: server-to-server with PCI DSS certification, tokenization with your own form, a hosted payment page, or an express checkout button in JavaScript. Plugins exist for NATS, WordPress and PHP. You create sites and SKUs in the merchant portal, test with synthetic card data, and have your payment form checked against Visa and Mastercard rules before going live. Merchant approval and onboarding take three to five business days on average.

Strengths and limitations of CentroBill