The stripe on the back of a credit card is a magnetic stripe, often called a magstripe. The magstripe is made up of tiny iron-based magnetic particles in a plastic-like film. Each particle is really a tiny bar magnet about 20-millionths of an inch long.
The magstripe can be 'written' because the tiny bar magnets can be magnetized in either a north or south pole direction. The magstripe on the back of the card is very similar to a piece of cassette tape (see How Cassette Tapes Work for details).
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A magstripe reader (you may have seen one hooked to someone's PC at a bazaar or fair) can understand the information on the three-track stripe. If the ATM isn't accepting your card, your problem is probably either:
- A dirty or scratched magstripe
- An erased magstripe (The most common causes for erased magstripes are exposure to magnets, like the small ones used to hold notes and pictures on the refrigerator, and exposure to a store's electronic article surveillance (EAS) tag demagnetizer.)
There are three tracks on the magstripe. Each track is about one-tenth of an inch wide. The ISO/IEC standard 7811, which is used by banks, specifies:
- Track one is 210 bits per inch (bpi), and holds 79 6-bit plus parity bit read-only characters.
- Track two is 75 bpi, and holds 40 4-bit plus parity bit characters.
- Track three is 210 bpi, and holds 107 4-bit plus parity bit characters.
How to put usb loader gx on wii. Your credit card typically uses only tracks one and two. Track three is a read/write track (which includes an encrypted PIN, country code, currency units and amount authorized), but its usage is not standardized among banks.
The information on track one is contained in two formats: A, which is reserved for proprietary use of the card issuer, and B, which includes the following:
- Start sentinel - one character
- Format code='B' - one character (alpha only)
- Primary account number - up to 19 characters
- Separator - one character
- Country code - three characters
- Name - two to 26 characters
- Separator - one character
- Expiration date or separator - four characters or one character
- Discretionary data - enough characters to fill out maximum record length (79 characters total)
- End sentinel - one character
- Longitudinal redundancy check (LRC) - one character LRC is a form of computed check character.
The format for track two, developed by the banking industry, is as follows:
Stripe Cc Checker
- Start sentinel - one character
- Primary account number - up to 19 characters
- Separator - one character
- Country code - three characters
- Expiration date or separator - four characters or one character
- Discretionary data - enough characters to fill out maximum record length (40 characters total)
- LRC - one character
For more information on track format, see ISO Magnetic Stripe Card Standards.
There are three basic methods for determining whether your credit card will pay for what you're charging:
- Merchants with few transactions each month do voice authentication using a touch-tone phone.
- Electronic data capture (EDC) magstripe-card swipe terminals are becoming more common -- so is swiping your own card at the checkout.
- Virtual terminals on the Internet
For more information on track format, see ISO Magnetic Stripe Card Standards.
There are three basic methods for determining whether your credit card will pay for what you're charging:
- Merchants with few transactions each month do voice authentication using a touch-tone phone.
- Electronic data capture (EDC) magstripe-card swipe terminals are becoming more common -- so is swiping your own card at the checkout.
- Virtual terminals on the Internet
This is how it works: After you or the cashier swipes your credit card through a reader, the EDC software at the point-of-sale (POS) terminal dials a stored telephone number (using a modem) to call an acquirer. An acquirer is an organization that collects credit-authentication requests from merchants and provides the merchants with a payment guarantee.
When the acquirer company gets the credit-card authentication request, it checks the transaction for validity and the record on the magstripe for:
- Merchant ID
- Valid card number
- Expiration date
- Credit-card limit
- Card usage
Single dial-up transactions are processed at 1,200 to 2,400 bits per second (bps), while direct Internet attachment uses much higher speeds via this protocol. In this system, the cardholder enters a personal identification number (PIN) using a keypad.
The PIN is not on the card -- it is encrypted (hidden in code) in a database. (For example, before you get cash from an ATM, the ATM encrypts the PIN and sends it to the database to see if there is a match.) The PIN can be either in the bank's computers in an encrypted form (as a cipher) or encrypted on the card itself. The transformation used in this type of cryptography is called one-way. This means that it's easy to compute a cipher given the bank's key and the customer's PIN, but not computationally feasible to obtain the plain-text PIN from the cipher, even if the key is known. This feature was designed to protect the cardholder from being impersonated by someone who has access to the bank's computer files.
Likewise, the communications between the ATM and the bank's central computer are encrypted to prevent would-be thieves from tapping into the phone lines, recording the signals sent to the ATM to authorize the dispensing of cash and then feeding the same signals to the ATM to trick it into unauthorized dispensing of cash.
If this isn't enough protection to ease your mind, there are now cards that utilize even more security measures than your conventional credit card: Smart Cards.
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Stripe Credit Card Processing
- Why Isn't My Credit Card Working?
You swipe your credit card as you've done so many times before — but, for some reason, it's not working. You hand the card over to the cashier to swipe; and they have no luck processing your payment using the magnetic strip either. Have you ever encountered this problem and wondered why the credit card chip is not working or your card won't swipe?
You know your account is in good standing, and maybe the card even looks fine. So why does a magnetic strip or a chip on a credit card you've used for a while all of a sudden refuse to cooperate?
Consider these potential causes for why your credit card won't swipe:
1. Your card is dirty.
Your card's chip or strip gets a little dirtier with every surface it encounters; eventually the buildup of grime may mean your credit card won't swipe. Though some credit card users have brought their card's swiping functionality back to life by applying and removing a piece of adhesive tape to remove debris, it's not a guaranteed solution — and could scratch the strip permanently. Others have suggested using a dollar bill to clean the chip.
2. Your purse or wallet uses a magnet.
The strip on the back of your credit card, and the information it contains about your account, uses magnetic particles in its swipe functionality. Contact with magnets can essentially scramble the data on a card's magnetic strip. Once that happens, point of sale terminals can't 'read' the card.
You may not see magnets in your purse or wallet, but they're a common design feature used to facilitate opening and closing. Your card's swiping ability could be compromised if your purse or wallet uses magnets and your card's strip comes close enough to them for an extended period of time.
3. Your card and your mobile device travel together.
The materials used in some card's magnetic strips are simply more susceptible to damage than others. If you happen to have one of these more sensitive strips (called low coercivity or LoCo) on your card and place it in direct contact with a mobile device for a long period of time, it could affect your card's ability to swipe. These days, LoCo stripes are becoming less and less common as most cards move toward high coercivity (HiCo) technology.
4. Your card was near a security sensor removal device.
Retailers often attach security sensors to items they sell in-store to deter theft, but some of the devices that are used to remove the sensors at the point of sale can affect the magnetic strip on a credit card placed close to them.
5. You brought your card into a room with an MRI machine.
Have you had a recent medical office visit that put you in close proximity to an MRI machine? That could explain why your credit card won't swipe. The magnetic forces used in MRI procedures are so strong that your card could lose its ability to swipe just by being in the same room as an imaging machine.
6. You scratched or disfigured the strip.
Carrying your credit card in your pocket with keys or coins can scratch the card's magnetic strip, making the swipe feature unusable. Likewise, your credit card won't swipe if the strip becomes bent or cracked to the extent that the data on the strip becomes distorted.
7. Your card overheated.
If you bring a credit card along on a hot summer day to the beach or pool, a few hours in extreme heat could distort its magnetic strip so that it won't swipe. Bringing your credit card into a hot yoga class could have a similar effect.
Credit Card Strip Not Working
8. You need to use the chip first.
Chip cards have been rolled out by credit card issuers and banks in order to enhance payment security, and when you try to swipe these cards at terminals that are fully enabled for chip cards, otherwise known as EMV, the terminal will prompt you to insert your card with the chip facing up and the chip going in first into the terminal instead. Cards with chip-and-PIN and near-field communication (NFC) technology typically aren't vulnerable to magnetism the same way magnetic stripes are.
The bottom line: If your credit card won't swipe, contact your card issuer for a replacement card. You may also want to consider a contactless card or using mobile payments.
Published December 21, 2016.
Cc-stripe Font Awesome
Updated September 14, 2020.