On 28 Mar, 17:26, Roland Perry wrote:

In message
, at
09:29:38 on Fri, 28 Mar 2008, Mizter T remarked:

AIUI debit cards use a different number range to credit cards.
Whether companies elsewhere in the world would be able to instantly
tell the difference between a UK issued debit and credit card is
another question.

I would be astonished to discover that there wasn't a standard ecommerce
plug-in that identified the kind of card (along with the one that
everyone uses to ensure the checksum is OK). Even if the seller doesn't
deploy one, their merchant services must, so they can tell who to send
the charge to.


One would think that likely for big ecommerce companies, but perhaps
not elsewhere.

I've certainly heard about people using some of the basic debit cards
- Visa Electron and Solo (i.e. the one's that need online
authorisation) - with companies and retailers that notionally
disallowed them, and I'm not just talking about railway booking
offices or ticket machines either. This led me to think that sometimes
perhaps the card number range filtering is implemented badly (or not
at all) by some retailers.

Additionally if retailers are not using online EPOS systems (i.e. if
the details all get sent in batches every so often - or even if the
card is processed manually, old-school style) then the merchant
service provider's systems won't necessarily get a chance to reject
inappropriate cards (if the EPOS machine doesn't already have an
appropriate filter installed).

I'm sure I'm using all the wrong terminology but you catch my drift!