For many things you can. The problem is the ones that matter. Meta, Google and TikTok ad accounts, AWS, and most US subscription services either decline a card issued outside the United States outright, or — more expensively — accept it once and then fail on renewal, which can stop a campaign or suspend an account with no warning.

The reason is where the card was issued rather than whether it has money on it. Many platforms restrict billing to cards from a short list of countries, and several run an address check that a card held abroad cannot satisfy.

A US-issued card with a US billing address clears both, which is the whole reason these cards exist.