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Comment by subbu | Hacker News Reader

A great tool for domain harvesters. I expect all meaningful .in domains to exhaust in a few months giving way to black market.

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It requires a PAN number, which seems to be a unique identifier for the entity that is registering the domain [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_account_number

Yeah, they are asking for unique PAN(Permanent Account Number) issued by Income Tax department, Government of India. However, I don't know if PAN issued to individuals will work here. The fourth letter of PAN identifies the type of entity PAN is issued for. For example, my PAN is APUPK3*M.

C — Company

P — Person

H — HUF(Hindu Undivided Family)

F — Firm

A — Association of Persons (AOP)

T — AOP (Trust)

B — Body of Individuals (BOI)

L — Local Authority

J — Artificial Juridical Person

G — Government

I guess they will check PAN to identify if it is "a business entity operating from India".

Can PAN card be verified using API? If so then who all can get access to that?

Its impossible to verify otherwise.

Partners include FISME(Federation of Indian Micro and Small & Medium Enterprises), a not-for-profit that has a lot of pull within the government and a really popular bank - ICICI (that has access to PAN numbers anyway); so an internal service to verify PAN numbers would be quite possible.

PS - PAN numbers are like SSNs over here.

Are they like SSNs in that they are dangerous information to give out? The grandparent post just wrote his in the comment and doesn't seem to concerned.

given the volumes, would not be too hard to do a manual verification with a 2-3 day turnaround

https://www.tin-nsdl.com/pan-verify/pan-verification-overvie...

Yes. It can be. Since the NSDL service is available to banks.

And since this program works in conjunction with ICICI. it's very possible

They can't verify the validity and authenticity of a PAN. Only a government/legal agency will be able to do it. So for this purpose I can just enter any arbitrary number that appears like a valid PAN and get through.

Seems like a lot of work to save $15 reg fee.

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