How to tell credit card's country of origin by its number?

Question

I'm trying to develop an application, which would give access to different services for people from different regions of the world.

Let's say, someone enters card number 1111-1111-1111-1111 . How do I use it to tell the country of origin?

I know that this is possible, because paypal and apple do it.

There's no country information encoded in the number itself; you need access to the customer's account information to get that. See http://adywicaksono.wordpress.com/2008/02/17/how-to-validate-credit-card-number/ — Robert Harvey, Jul 02 '12 at 16:00

score 36 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 22 '16 at 17:05

36

Use BinList. It simply tells you the country of origin by checking the first 6 digits of the card number. It has a neat Json based API as well.

answered Jan 22 '16 at 17:05

Pecheneg

1

BinList returns incorrect brand (Visa) and country for my MasterCard, so I would not trust it. – P. Šileikis Jan 04 '17 at 09:27
1

@P.Šileikis I agree with you. Unfortunately there is no formal API for this kind of work. – Pecheneg Jan 04 '17 at 09:32
2

From the wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_card_number#Issuer_identification_number_.28IIN.29 the first 6-digits (BIN number) allows to define country / ranges - Binlist ranges are : https://github.com/binlist/data/blob/master/ranges.csv – DependencyHell Apr 06 '18 at 08:06
it works for my cards (+1) – Jose Manuel Abarca Rodríguez Mar 30 '22 at 14:35
1

unfortunately, the site stated that they don't update their data anymore and they launched a paid version under https://iinlist.com/ – Mr.Cat Mar 08 '23 at 22:09

ZnArK · Accepted Answer · 2014-06-16T13:34:32.047

5

At first, I questioned whether this information could be gleened from the credit card number alone.

Then I found it here:

Edit - Don't forget about PCI Compliance if you are taking credit card numbers for payment.

Edit - Apparently the previous wikipedia page has been deleted. This appears to have similar information.

edited Jun 16 '14 at 13:34

answered Jul 02 '12 at 16:03

ZnArK

Well, sure. But couldn't I get a Visa card in the United States and use it while living abroad, or vice versa? Sure, you can get broad provider information, but I don't see how that would be useful at all for marketing purposes. – Robert Harvey Jul 02 '12 at 16:05
@RobertHarvey That is true. (I've done it) I'm interested in what the OP is trying to do with the country information. I would imagine that IP based geolocation would suit well for detecting what country a transaction is coming from. – ZnArK Jul 02 '12 at 16:11
the link isnt available – Emilio Gort May 27 '14 at 19:03

score 4 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 23 '20 at 10:37

4

checkout https://binlist.io/ opensource and it looks like they have a maintained csv file on their github page: https://github.com/iannuttall/binlist-data

answered Jun 23 '20 at 10:37

Sjaak Wish

3 Answers3