It’s also possible that Paypal is blacklisting certain card numbers (or ranges), which may have been previously used/abused many different times by many different people. (VPN users can encounter this kind of problem, having their IP addresses banned on some sites due to the actions of previous users)

If this company is either recycling well-worn credit card numbers or trying to pass off debit cards as credit cards, then that’s certainly a major problem.

Although they might look identical, some people may not know that there is a huge difference between credit cards and debit cards regarding what they will buy. Most debit-card users should be well aware that many merchants (both online and brick-and-mortar) that take credit cards for payment refuse debit cards, (especially the anonymous store-bought kind) and there have been reports of companies charging additional fees for debit card use.

Although most “lifetime” subscriptions generally only last a short time, this looks like a service where the cost to the company of keeping additional “lifetime” users onboard is going to be small to miniscule, assuming it’s just sharing the same pool of numbers. So this “lifetime” promise is not automatically a cut-and-run scam, as would be expected for any service that costs the company considerable money to keep providing to the customer year after year for no additional payment.