On Mon, 16 Jul 2001, Christopher Ostmo wrote:
> John Donagher pressed the little lettered thingies in this order...
>
> > My suggestion is to run an authorization for an extremely small amount of
> > money ($1.00 is fairly standard) and that will tell you if the account is
> > valid or not. Doing validation yourself implies a fully-publicly-understood
>
> Maybe I am the only one, but I would NEVER do business with ANY
> company that charged my credit card just to see if it was valid.
>
Note, I said authorization, not charge. An authorization is a form of sale
which is really a two-step process. The authorization places a hold on the
funds, and then a capture transaction is initiated which indicates that the
funds should be transferred. Running an authorization is harmless because (in
this case) it is never captured. The only ill-effect is that your credit limit
is reduced by $1.00 until the authorization expires (around a month or so).
This is an accepted practice.
> At any rate, the initial request was to see if their was a way by which
> you could tell whether the number is valid BEFORE it is sent to the
> bank for processing. Since this solution requires sending the card to
> the bank for processing to see if the number is valid, it would defeat the
> purpose.
>
I did read the question. Every question has a context. My response is still
valid within the context of his question. There may be mitigating factors, but
in the projects I've worked on in the past, the approach I suggested has proved
much more reliable in the long-term.
John
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John Donagher
Application Engineer
Intacct Corp. - Powerful Accounting on the Web
408-395-0989
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