What is a lost or stolen card decline? (codes 41 & 43)

A lost or stolen card decline is the issuing bank's way of saying the cardholder reported the card lost or stolen. The issuer has frozen the card number — no new authorizations will succeed, and the original pickup-card instruction in ISO 8583 translates to 'stop using this card' in card-not-present billing.

Both codes 41 (Lost Card) and 43 (Stolen Card) are hard declines. The difference is administrative: lost implies misplaced, stolen implies taken. For recovery purposes they're identical — the stored card is dead and the customer needs to supply a replacement.

Once an issuer flags a card as lost or stolen, the flag stays on the number permanently. Every retry returns the same 41 or 43 until the merchant gives up. The card was almost certainly reissued under a new number, which the issuer sent to the cardholder — but that new number is not automatically available to merchants who stored the old one.

A network account updater may eventually propagate the replacement card, but for a lost/stolen flag the window is often too short — the issuer froze the old number immediately and the updater hasn't caught up.

Stop retrying the flagged card immediately — repeated fraud declines inflate your decline ratio with the issuer and waste retry attempts.

Reach the customer on a channel they answer — email and SMS — and explain their card was reported lost or stolen so the charge couldn't go through. Ask them to add their replacement card.

Revatto runs this sequence for you: AI detects the decline, a real team handles the outreach over email and SMS under your brand, and a human follows up when the customer goes quiet. You only pay when the payment is recovered — 20% of the first recovered payment, $0 monthly.