About Dark Dollars
Dark Dollars is an independent reference for payment card engineering. This page explains who runs it, where the data comes from, and the standards we hold ourselves to when we publish the guides and tools.
Who we are
Dark Dollars is an independent reference site. We are not a shop, we do not broker transactions and we do not sell card data. What we publish is technical reference material: how identifiers are allocated, how record formats are structured, what each validation step actually proves, and how the pieces of a card payment fit together.
What this site covers
The reference is organised around the layers of a card payment. Identifiers cover how the IIN and PAN are structured and allocated, and how a BIN resolves to an issuer, a brand, a card level and a country. Record formats cover ISO/IEC 7812 data elements, ISO/IEC 7813 magnetic stripe records and the EMV TLV encoding used by chip applications. Validation covers the Luhn checksum and the other checksums used across financial identifiers, and what each one can and cannot tell you. Flows cover authorisation, clearing, settlement, chargebacks and 3-D Secure.
- An open BIN dataset of 374,788 prefixes across 225 countries and 18,373 issuing banks, published as pages, a CSV and a JSON API.
- 74 free tools that run entirely in your browser, so nothing you type is transmitted or logged.
- A free REST API with a published OpenAPI specification.
- Guides and a glossary written and reviewed against the source standards rather than paraphrased from each other.
Where a page discusses buying or evaluating card data, it does so to explain the structure and the risks involved. We do not facilitate the acquisition of payment card data, and the sponsored listings that appear on one page of this site are disclosed as such.
How we keep this site accurate
The pages on this site are reference material, not adverts. Each topic is written to answer a specific question a buyer or seller actually asks, and it is reviewed against how the marketplace operates today. Where a rule changes, the page is updated so the description and the marketplace never drift apart. If something is unclear, the contact page is the place to say so.
The team behind the guides
Editorial standards
We aim to be specific rather than promotional. That means stating limits and conditions plainly, avoiding claims we cannot stand behind, and describing how the checker, the refund guarantee and the seller rating system actually behave. When a term is ambiguous across the industry, such as a check timestamp, we define it the way the standards bodies use it.
Get in touch
For general questions email the admin at [email protected], or open a support ticket from your account for anything tied to an order. The full details are on the contact page.