What
BIN (Bank Identification Number) or IIN (Issuer Identification Number)
is the first six digits of the number of various financial cards, such as Visa® or MasterCard®. These digits identify which organization issued it. This project is a community effort to create and maintain a complete and up-to-date IIN database so that anyone could search and contibute to it.
What For
An IIN lookup tool has many important real-world applications. It is used by organizations that process credit card payments to combat fraud and to enforce country-specific policies, by the government to investigate indentity theft, by financial institutions to identify various security issues, and so on.
Why Not the Official Sources
Let us quote Wikipedia: “The official ISO registry of IINs, the “ISO Register of Card Issuer Identification Numbers” is not available to the general public. It is only available to institutitions which hold IINs, issue plastic cards, or act as a financial network or processor…The secrecy regarding the official ISO registry of IINs is probably motivated by concern for security through obscurity. However, many people argue that this- and any attempt at security through obscurity- is pointless for a number of reasons… someone seeking to reconstruct the ISO registry could find the most common entries just by asking a large number of people to tell them their card type and the first six digits of their card.” That’s exactly what we decided to do. We ask you, the cardholder, to share this information for the benefit of everyone.
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