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Has anyone ever used Credit Cards for verifying the identity of an individual (the thinking being that if a person knows the a name and a credit card number that has been issued to that name, it is probably the right person).

If so, what service have you used?

Is there an alternate approach to this problem, one that does not require credit cards?

I'm trying to do this using ASP.NET MVC.

Thanks Jaspreet

floatingfrisbee
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  • So, a stolen CC will pass, seeing as the thief will have both the number and name on the card (as well as the CCV). – Oded Oct 13 '11 at 19:12
  • Yup. There is an IP address check that can be done (is done) to determine if the request is coming from a known set of bad IPs. But otherwise if your card if stolen and you haven't called your company to put it on hold, all bets are off. – floatingfrisbee Oct 13 '11 at 19:49

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Since credit card transaction do not transmit the card holder's name, nor is it received in the response from the processing bank, this won't be something you can accomplish. Naturally banks won't divulge this information except to the cardholder and they already know their own names!

John Conde
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  • Yea, that is pretty much confirmed based on my conversations with paypal.com and authorize.net. The sales person who at Authorize.net was pretty adamant that the name is verified, but as soon as I got through to someone technical they said that name is not verified any more. The guy at paypal said that while it was true in the past, it is no longer the case because of things like linked cards, corporate cards etc. We are looking at a couple of alternatives like whitepages.com and usinfosearch.com who claim to provide real identity verification services. – floatingfrisbee Oct 14 '11 at 17:18
  • FYI, another provider of identity verification services is Lexis Nexis. – floatingfrisbee Oct 18 '11 at 13:58