Marc Vinyals

Shopping on Israeli websites as a foreigner

As a security feature, Israeli credit & debit cards are linked to the cardholder’s ID number, and this number is frequently required when shopping on an Israeli website. This leads to two awkward situations.

Using a foreign card with no ID

The foreign card is not linked to any ID, so the question makes no sense, but an ID number is needed anyway. In this case, the fake ID number 122222227 is often enough to satisfy the local frontend and let the request continue towards the card issuer.

Using an Israeli card with a foreign ID

In this case the ID number is the passport number preceded by enough zeros to make it a nine-digit string. While the card issuer requires exactly that string, most common website frontends are overzealous and will not accept it as it does not satisfy the rules for a valid Israeli ID number.

The good news is that the frontend validation is just javascript, and javascript can be changed by the client. And if hypothetically a user were to open a javascript console (Ctrl+Shift+K) and type function checkIsraelId(num) { return true; }, then that faulty validation would be bypassed and everything would work flawlessly. Not that I ever tried.