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by zbuf 1525 days ago
Are any credit cards issued with numbers beginning zero?

I would bet this sort of pragmatic workaround is taking place.

1 comments

Credit Card numbers start with a BIN (Bank Identification Number) that is 6 or 8 digits. The first digit of the BIN is the MII (Major Industry Identifier). The MII of 0 is indeed valid, but seems to be reserved for use by the committee managing the spec? In any case, it's perfectly valid to have a CC# starting with a 0.
And this is the kind of thing that can get you if you get "too smart" about verifying the number, by assuming that 0 is reserved and will never be used.

We see this with IP addresses where hardcoded assumptions that were wrong or became wrong blow things up. For example, many people didn't realize that 172.* isn't entirely reserved for internal IPs.