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.

Angadresma

There's no country information encoded in the number itself; you need access to the customer's account information to get that. See adywicaksono.wordpress.com/2008/02/17/… – Tubb

@RobertHarvey That's not entirely true, see my post – Deoxyribonuclease

binbase.com , dev.maxmind.com/minfraud – Ossifrage

Answer 1

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

Then I found it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bank_Identification_Numbers

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.

Deoxyribonuclease

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. – Tubb

@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. – Deoxyribonuclease

the link isnt available – Ossifrage

Answer 2

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.

Safelight

BinList returns incorrect brand (Visa) and country for my MasterCard, so I would not trust it. – Upbraid

@P.Šileikis I agree with you. Unfortunately there is no formal API for this kind of work. – Safelight

From the wikipedia article en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… the first 6-digits (BIN number) allows to define country / ranges - Binlist ranges are : github.com/binlist/data/blob/master/ranges.csv – Rockbottom

it works for my cards (+1) – Bulldozer

unfortunately, the site stated that they don't update their data anymore and they launched a paid version under iinlist.com – Lucy

Answer 3

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

Toxicosis