What is a Bank Identification Number (BIN)?
Is the Name on the Card Full Name?
What Happens if Your Name is Spelled Wrong on a Credit Card?
I need to verify the person who swiped his card is actually someone he claimed to be.
Yes, you can. We had to do this a while back for an e-commerce application we wrote.
The first 6 digits of a credit card is known as the Bank Identification Number (or BIN). Some credit card processing gateways can return this information, or you can do it yourself. There are public databases with this information stored for each card type: VISA, MasterCard, AMEX, etc.
This list shows some of the common BINs:
And this link explains this concept to a little better depth.
Hope this helps!
The first six numbers identify the card type and bank. In America we tend to take the short cut of the first number to identify card type, but in fact the first four identify the exact card issuing company and the bank is further identified by the last two (card types with more than 100 banks will have more than one set of numbers in the first four). All six numbers identify the bank exactly. Pace mbmccormick, though, this list is not regarded as public information, and if you wanted to get an authoritative list you would have to pay for it and only get it with confidentiality agreements.
However, enough of the information has been collected and identified publicly that you can get an approximate answer from publicly available BIN databases. This is especially true if the individual bank is not your greatest concern (that is you are not looking to call them or validate that the card holder can correctly identify the bank based on the bin number) but rather you want to make sure that the card is issued in the same country as the card holder claims (or wants to ship to).
I wanted to know this for some time.
When you come to a brick-and-mortar store (Walmart, Costco, small business, etc.), and you have never signed up for anything or registered for any products or services they have (Costco excepted), grab a bunch of stuff in the aisles and bring it to the check out, and tap with your payment card...
Does the store have all that data ready to be seen at any time from point of the transaction, and if so, for how long would they retain it? Or do they just have the last four digits of the card used?
TIA