A valid credit card number (also known as Primary Account Number - PAN) has several fields and each of them has a meaning. For the technically inclined, this number complies to the ISO/IEC 7812 numbering standard. An contains a six-digit issuer identification number (IIN), an individual account identification number, and a single digit checksum.
The first digit of the issuer identification number is the major industry identifier (MII). It identifies the industry where the card will be most used in. If this digit is 9 the next three digits are the country code from ISO 3166-1.
The issuer identification number also known as the bank identification number (BIN) is the first six digits of the credit card number. These identify the institution that issued the credit card to the card holder. Here's a list of known IIN prefixes.
Afterwards comes the account number, digit 7 to last minus one. The maximum length of the account number is 12 digits. This is an individual account identifier.
The last digit is the checksum which we explained how to calculate using the MOD 10 algorithm. It is used to validate the primary account number to protect against accidental errors.
The credit card numbers you generate on this page are completely random. When we say they are valid, we merely imply that they are a possible combination of characters which will validate when passed through the MOD 10 algorithm. You can also generate valid credit card numbers for specific Issuing Networks by utilising their particular prefixes. However, we do not provide you (obviously) with the correspondent verification code for these cards, as they are completely fake and made up randomly.
To be completely clear and spell this out, these fake credit card numbers should not be used to try and purchase stuff. They merely respect guidelines of a valid credit card number. I advise you not not to try to use these for any actual transactions, only for testing purposes! In order to complete a purchase a combination of data must be had, and merely a card number is not enough. Information such as expiration date, card holders name and CVV numbers. Merely typing a valid credit card number into a form is not enough to purchase anything and you should not attempt to.
Read more about CNP transactions and how you need more information about a card to make a purchase remotely. We do not condone nor support fraud.
If you've ever found yourself trying to try a product online which required a credit card, even when you just want to take a look, you know why we made this. We believe there's no need to share such information with providers without the actual intent to buy stuff. Anyone can make a website with a form and require you to insert valuable and sensitive information which requires you to give up your privacy. This is a way to protect yourself in such situations.
The other reason we made this are programmers testing ecommerce websites, applications or other software. They usually need lots of fake data, and this is a very easy way to generate a bunch of valid credit card numbers in a split second. There's another tool for those times when you need to generate all other kinds of data.
The MOD 10 algorithm is a checksum (detection of errors) formula which is the common name for the Luhn algorithm. This formula has been in use to validate a lot of identification numbers besides credit cards since its development by scientist Hans Peter Luhn from IBM. To teach you how to manually validate a specific number, lets do an example:
Say we have 38520000023237 and we want to check if it could be a real credit card number
7. This is our check digit38520000023236,8,10,2,0,0,0,0,0,2,6,2,610 = 1 + 0 = 16+8+1+2+0+0+0+0+0+2+6+2+6 = 3333 * 9 = 2977. If this matches the check digit we have a valid sequence7 matches our result 7, we conclude that this sequence would be a valid credit card number!In order for a credit card number to be valid, it has to be validated by the MOD 10 algorithm. This is an algorithm specifically designed to prevent accidental errors such as typos. Knowing the Major Industry Identifier (MII) and the Issuer Identification Number (IIN) we can prefix a credit card number and then randomly select the rest, as long as they comply to the MOD 10 algorithm.
For more complete testing data you can make up an expiration dates, a card holder name and possibly an address with a zip code.
We choose not to provide this data but you can easily make up this information. The real challenge is getting a valid credit card number which passes the test so that's what we focused on.
Feel free to use the online credit card number generator as many times as you wish.