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.
Where
Here, on this Web site, right now, you can
look up the issuer information by the card's IIN. And be sure to
add a record or two to this database if you know any IINs our database doesn't know yet!
