Card processing apparatus and system, POS terminal for card processing, and credit card processing control method

To reliably process a card such as a credit card to acquire accurate card information in accordance with the present invention without lowering job productivity, magnetic data is read from the card and in the same operation the front of the card is scanned to secure an image of data information such as the card number. The resulting image data is stored in memory. A control unit in conjunction with a reading evaluator such as a computer determines if the magnetic data has been successfully read or not. If reading the magnetic data is not successful, an OCR unit extracts the card number from the card by OCR processing of the scanned image data. The card number extracted by the OCR unit is then used for a card C authorization check.