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I thought credit card account numbers somehow encoded your name.

No. If that were true, then a bank couldn't issue you a new card with a new number. Or worse, someone who knew the algorithm could reverse-engineer the credit card number from your name and make purchases on your behalf.

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I'll swear that I validated this claim sometime in my young life while trying to make up random credit card numbers to register with AOL 2.0. I think the card verification was an offline system (because my modem wasn't dialed in), so I was convinced that it had the name decryption algorithm built in. Who knows though...


No, all you validated was the Single Digit Checksum.
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Tony Fabris