Whether you’re getting your car repaired, or buying dinner, nearly every business that takes a credit card has a unique merchant code that reports your purchases—except when you buy a firearm.
A merchant category code, commonly referred to as an MCC, is a four-digit code used by credit card companies to classify different types of businesses and to identify the types of goods or services the company sells. is the number of. they were first mandated by Internal Revenue Service in 2004And currently, the MCC guidelines are maintained by the International Organization for Standardization.
If you have ever been called by your bank, you have been asked to confirm prior purchases that were found to be potentially fraudulent, through MCC. Credit card companies use MCC intelligence and data to find patterns or patterns in consumer purchases to prevent things ranging from fraud to human trafficking.
Priscilla Sims Brown, President and CEO amalgamated bankCNBC’s Andrew Ross told Sorkin Develop global summit The banking and financial industries can and should use these codes to track gun purchases to help prevent gun violence.
“While there are merchant codes for hair salons and shoe shine places and every other retailer, there is no merchant code for gun stores,” Brown said. “If we had a merchant code for gun shops, we could detect patterns that indicated that something unusual was happening.”
Credit card companies can detect any unusual activity, and submit a Suspicious Activity Report with law enforcement if necessary. This type of activity monitoring will prove especially important when someone buys a large amount of a weapon, Brown said, or when someone is buying a weapon for someone who isn’t legally allowed to do so.
The software would be able to detect, for example, if someone spent $1,000 at a firearm store, and on the same day, received a $1,000 deposit from someone who is not legally allowed to buy a firearm himself. Furthermore, the type of mass buying that MCC would allow banks to trace has proven to be a pattern in the buying history of recent mass shooters in the US.
For example, the shooter who killed 59 people at a Las Vegas concert in 2017 charged more than $90,000 on credit cards prior to the shooting. The New York Times reported That shooter had opened six new credit card accounts months earlier, and twelve days before the shooting, a race to buy more than $26,000 of firearms and ammunition began. Before that, their average spending was only $1,500 per month.
If these gun purchases had been tagged with MCC, Brown said, credit card companies would have been notified of this alarming pattern.
to date, both Visa And master card A firearms dealer is against the code. “We think every single one of those reasons will be something that can be managed,” Brown said of the reasons provided by credit card companies.
Card companies have cited concerns over differences between big box stores selling multiple items and more specialized firearms retailers.
Visa and Mastercard could not be immediately reached for comment.
Amalgamated Bank submitted an application in July 2021 to create an MCC for dealers of firearms and ammunition, but this was rejected by the International Standards Organization. CBS Received Documents Last month, employees of domestic and international credit card companies including Visa, MasterCard and American Express were part of an internal committee that recommended rejection of the application.
Brown said resistance to Visa and MasterCard is based on issues with smaller gun stores and larger retailers that could be overcome by having more than one MCC. “You can of course have more than one merchant code, including one for those that are pure-play gun stores and those that aren’t. So there are a number of ways we can manage this problem if We like.”
In fact, this is already common practice. A super-store that has both a grocery and a pharmacy, for example, may have different MCCs for different products sold in the same business.