13 Signs of a Valid Visa Card 2023 have a set of unique security features that every merchant should be familiar with.

Each time you accept a Visa card for payment 13 Signs of a Valid Visa Card method:

and while waiting for the issuer’s response to your authorization request, you should review these features to ensure they have not been altered or tampered with in any way 13 Signs of a Valid Visa Card.

Please note that authorization approval does not protect you from fraud and it is your responsibility to verify the validity of the transaction 13 Signs of a Valid Visa Card.

Today, I’ll look at Visa card number format, brand card identifiers, and offer tips on how to verify their validity.

13 Signs of a Valid Visa Card You’ll also learn how to verify Visa card numbers, how to correctly accept card payments in face-to-face and card-not-present settings, and how to identify suspicious customer behavior.

With a few simple regular expressions, you can easily verify that your customer has entered a valid credit card number on the order form. You can even specify the type of credit card you use. Each card issuer has its own range of card numbers, which are identified by the first 4 digits 13 Signs of a Valid Visa Card.

You can use a slightly different regular expression in larger documents to find credit card numbers or ranges of numbers that might be credit card numbers. This can be very useful to demonstrate in a security audit that you are not inappropriately disclosing your clients’ financial information 13 Signs of a Valid Visa Card.

Let’s start with the order form 13 Signs of a Valid Visa Card.

Removing spaces and dashes
The first step is to remove all non-digits from the card number entered by the customer. Physical credit cards have spaces in the card number to group the digits together, making it easier for people to read or write. So your order form should accept card numbers with spaces or dashes 13 Signs of a Valid Visa Card.

To remove all non-digits from the card number, simply use the “replace all” function in your scripting language to find the regular expression [^0-9]+ and replace it with nothing. If you want to replace only spaces and dashes, you can use [ -]+. If this regular expression looks strange, remember that in a character class, a hyphen is literal when it occurs immediately before a closing parenthesis (or immediately after an opening parenthesis or backslash).

If you’re wondering what the plus is for: performance. If the input has consecutive non-digits, such as 1===2, then [^0-9]+ matches three equals signs at once and clears them with one replacement. Without the plus, three exchanges would be necessary. In this case, the saving is only a few microseconds. But it’s good practice to keep the effectiveness of regular expressions in the back of your mind. Even if the savings here are minimal, the effort to write is another plus 13 Signs of a Valid Visa Card.

Verifying credit card numbers on your order form.

Validating credit card numbers is an ideal job for regular expressions. It’s just a sequence of 13 to 16 digits, with a few specific digits at the beginning that identify the card issuer. You can use the specific regular expressions below to alert customers when they try to use a type of card you don’t accept, or to redirect orders using different cards to different processors. All of these regular expressions were taken from RegexBuddy’s library.

Visa: ^4[0-9]{12}(?:[0-9]{3})?$ All Visa card numbers start with 4. New cards have 16 digits. Old cards have 13.
MasterCard: ^(?:5[1-5][0-9]{2}|222[1-9]|22[3-9][0-9]|2[3-6][0-9 ] ]{2}|27[01][0-9]|2720)[0-9]{12}$ MasterCard numbers start with either 51 to 55 or 2221 to 2720. All are 16 digits long 13 Signs of a Valid Visa Card.
American Express: ^3[47][0-9]{13}$ American Express card numbers start with 34 or 37 and have 15 digits.

Diners Club: ^3(?:0[0-5]|[68][0-9])[0-9]{11}$ Diners Club card numbers start from 300 to 305, 36 or 38. All have 14 digits . There are Diners Club cards that start with 5 and have 16 digits. This is a joint venture between Diners Club and MasterCard and should be processed as MasterCard.

Discover: ^6(?:011|5[0-9]{2})[0-9]{12}$ Discover card numbers start with 6011 or 65. All are 16 digits long.
JCB: ^(?:2131|1800|35\d{3})\d{11}$ JCB cards starting with 2131 or 1800 have 15 digits. JCB cards starting with 35 have 16 digits 13 Signs of a Valid Visa Card.
If you just want to check if the card number looks valid without specifying the brand, you can combine the above six regular expressions using rotation. A non-capturing group places anchors out of rotation. Free spaces allow comments and regular expressions to be inserted to fit the width of this page 13 Signs of a Valid Visa Card.

These regular expressions easily catch numbers that are invalid because the customer entered too many or too few digits. It will not capture numbers with incorrect digits. To do this, you have to follow Luhn’s algorithm, which cannot be done with a regular expression 13 Signs of a Valid Visa Card.

And of course, even if a number is mathematically valid, it does not mean that a card with that number was issued or that there is money in the account. The benefit or regular expression is that you can put it in a bit of JavaScript to immediately check for obvious errors instead of the customer having to wait 30 seconds for your credit card processor to fail the order.

And if your card processor charges fees for failed transactions, you’ll really want to implement both regular expression and Luhn validation 13 Signs of a Valid Visa Card.

Finding credit card numbers in documents 13 Signs of a Valid Visa Card.

With two simple modifications, you can use any of the above regular expressions to find card numbers in larger documents. Simply replace the dash and dollar with a word boundary as in \b4[0-9]{12}(?:[0-9]{3})?\b.

If you plan to search a large document server, a simpler regular expression will speed up the search. Unless your company uses 16-digit numbers for other purposes, you will have few false positives. The regular expression \b\d{13,16}\b finds any sequence of 13 to 16 digits 13 Signs of a Valid Visa Card.

When scanning a hard drive full of files, you can’t first remove spaces and dashes like you can when verifying a single card number. To find card numbers with spaces or dashes, use \b(?:\d[ -]*?){13,16}\b. This regular expression allows any number of spaces and dashes anywhere in the number. This is really the only way. Visa and MasterCard put the digits in sets of 4, while Amex and Discover use groups of 4, 5, and 6 digits. People who enter numbers may have different ideas.
Have you ever wondered what all those numbers you can never remember printed on your credit card actually mean? We use cards daily, but most of us have little understanding of the history and purpose they represent.

How to read your credit card number
That long number on the front of your card is full of important information. The order of the digits is not random, but strategically arranged according to the dormitory 13 Signs of a Valid Visa Card.

With the increase in technology, the number of counterfeit, cloned, altered and counterfeit (CAF) cards increased by 12% compared to last year. This article gives you a quick, law enforcement-level guide to spotting a fake card beyond just ID matching and card verification at the processor.

Symmetry
First, look at the numbers to make sure they are evenly spaced and aligned. A counterfeiter usually uses an aftermarket folding/embossing machine that processes one number at a time. As such, numbers are often skewed.

Correlation
Next, check that the account number matches the name of the card. Amex starts at 3, Visa at 4, MasterCard (MC) at 5 and Discover at 6. You’d be surprised how many thieves can’t do their basic homework.

Magnetic strip
Some thieves are lazy or cheap and fail to coordinate the data on the magnetic strip with the data on the front of the card. To prevent this, the bad guys deliberately damage the strip by scratching or degaussing it, forcing the merchant to manually enter the altered numbers on the front.

Receipt Match
If you don’t have access to a magnetic stripe decoding device to check the stripe, a simple way to verify the stripe and number is to make a transaction and see if the last four numbers printed on the receipt match.

Hologram
Check the hologram on the Visa and MC front hologram label and the top back strip on the Amex card for a foil hologram. Counterfeit cards often have a boring 2D look.

Signature strip
The signature strip requires a different material to create the card and is also often overlooked in counterfeiting. The stripe should be on the back and white.

UV logos
If you are in branch and have access to UV or black light, check the UV logo on most cards. “AM EX” will appear on the front of the Amex card, “MC” on the MasterCard, a flying “V” in the lower left corner and a dove logo in the middle of the Visa card, and “Discover” will be written across the card. Discover the tab.

Microprinting
Most cards have a microprint verification number that can be seen with a magnifying glass. This gets about 80% of all thieves and the microprint can usually be found under the account number or on the back. Although it varies from card to card, the microprint usually duplicates the first or last 4 digits of the account number.

Behaviour
Finally, nothing verifies fraud like nervous cardholder behavior. The most common tactic is for the thief to try to confuse or distract the official to take the attention away from the CAF card 13 Signs of a Valid Visa Card.

If any of the above doesn’t look right, contact law enforcement as there’s a high chance you’re dealing with identity theft and possibly counterfeiting. Credit and debit card fraud is fairly easy to detect due to the above, while prepaid cards typically only have half the fraud prevention mechanisms listed above and are therefore more difficult. While this article won’t make you an expert, it will provide you with above-average knowledge 13 Signs of a Valid Visa Card.