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Protecting Your Business with a BIN List A BIN list is vital for anyone who wants to conduct business, especially if that business is done online. After all, in a physical store you have the advantage of being able to see the person who is attempting to use a credit card. You can check their driver's license or other forms of identification to verify their identity. However, online merchants do not have that luxury. They have to come up with more creative ways to keep their businesses from becoming victimized by credit card fraud. How a BIN List Protects Your Business When you first step foot into the world of retail, you probably don't know what a BIN is. The BIN, or bank identification number, is the first six digits of any credit card. Those digits tell you what kind of card it is, which entity issued the card and, consequently, the country the card was issued in. Knowing this information means that you can verify it with other elements of the customer's order. It's like an online merchant's own way of being able to check further identification before accepting a credit card from someone, sight unseen. A BIN list is basically a list of numbers that allows you to match countries and issuers with BINs. For example, a BIN list will tell you that all Visa cards start with a 5, and all Mastercards start with a 51 through a 55 number. American Express cards start with either 34 or 37. Of course a BIN list goes far beyond these simple classifications by telling you very specific information about card issuers and providing you with a phone number in case there is a red flag and you need to call and verify the card on the telephone yourself. Using a BIN List A BIN list is very simple to use because it simply gets implemented right on your website in your shopping cart. Your web programmer implements that BIN list with whatever programming language he uses, and then whenever a customer enters in a credit card number, your site matches it against the BIN list to make sure that countries and information match. A BIN list provides you with complete protection against counterfeit credit cards, as well as providing an additional layer of protection against stolen credit cards. By matching the country with the credit card issuer, you will have a better idea of whether a transaction is made by a legitimate customer or not. Another way to use a BIN list is to check the issuer of the card with the IP address of the computer used to place the order on your site. By checking the IP address, you'll be able to easily see if someone in Mexico is using a credit card that was issued across the ocean in the United Kingdom. Then you can check the shipping and billing addresses to see if everything looks legitimate. Bin2Country provides a BIN list for both online and offline uses. The site also offers an IP to country database as an additional part of its service.
For a comprehensive BIN list, please visit our website.
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