Patent ID: 11948189
Assignee: MASTERCARD INTERNATIONAL INCORPORATED
Field: Computer technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G | IPC G

Claim 9:
10. A computer-implemented method for identifying complete account identifiers from partial account identifiers, said computer-implemented method implemented using an account identification computing device in communication with a memory device and an interchange network, said computer-implemented method comprising:
receiving, by the account identification computing device, messages communicated over the interchange network, the messages transmitted over the interchange network formatted according to a proprietary communications standard for requesting payment transactions;
extracting, by the account identification computing device, from the messages communicated over the interchange network based on the proprietary communications standard, transaction data for a plurality of transactions, wherein the transaction data for each of the plurality of transactions includes a unique merchant identifier and an account identifier;
building, by the account identification computing device, a merchant table using the transaction data for storage within a database, the merchant table stored within the database and including merchant profiles, each of the merchant profiles including i) one of the unique merchant identifiers included in the plurality of transactions and ii) at least one account identifier associated with the unique merchant identifier;
identifying, by the account identification computing device, for each of the unique merchant identifiers included in the merchant table, a merchant name associated with the unique merchant identifier;
parsing, by the account identification computing device, the plurality of merchant profiles included in the merchant table to retrieve and consolidate all unique merchant identifiers that are associated with the same merchant name;
generating, by the account identification computing device, a data file for each consolidated group of unique merchant identifiers, each data file storing a list of the consolidated unique merchant identifiers in association with a single cleansed merchant name:
building, by the account identification computing device, using the generated data files, an updated merchant table that includes a plurality of updated merchant profiles, each updated merchant profile including one of the cleansed merchant names and a plurality of account identifiers associated with that cleansed merchant name, wherein a number of updated merchant profiles in the updated merchant table is less than a number of merchant profiles in the merchant table;
receiving, by the account identification computing device, a list including a plurality of partial account identifiers that correspond to potentially exposed account identifiers;
performing, by the account identification computing device, a lookup with the database to determine a number of candidate account identifiers associated with each cleansed merchant name in the updated merchant table, wherein the candidate account identifiers are complete account identifiers associated with one of the cleansed merchant names that are at least a partial match to a partial account identifier on the list;
calculating, by the account identification computing device, for each cleansed merchant name in the updated merchant table, at least one metric based on the number of candidate account identifiers associated with the respective cleansed merchant name;
identifying, by the account identification computing device, from among the cleansed merchant names in the updated merchant table, a source cleansed merchant name corresponding to a likely common source of the plurality of partial account identifiers based on the at least one metric;
matching, by the account identification computing device, at least one candidate account identifier to a complete account identifier associated with the source cleansed merchant name by matching one of the plurality of partial account identifiers linked to the cleansed merchant name to the at least one candidate account identifier to output a matched account identifier, thereby identifying the matched account identifier as one of the potentially exposed account identifiers corresponding to the received list;
storing, by the account identification computing device, a list of the matched account identifiers in the database, the list of the matched account identifiers flagged as high risk for being involved in a data breach event; and
transmitting, by the account identification computing device, a message to an issuer of the at least one matched account identifier from the list of the matched account identifiers advising the issuer that the at least one matched account identifier was exposed to a data breach and susceptible to future fraudulent transactions.