I cannot speak to the effectiveness of @CreditCardNumber because I wrote my own annotation using Apache Commons Validator.  If I understand correctly, the Hibernate Validator version uses the Luhn algorithm for validation while the Commons version uses that and additional mechanisms to verify against the type of card.  The implementation is fairly trivial, and it works for me.

As far as @CreditCardNumber, perhaps you could post the manner you are annotating your entity and how you are using one of the Seam JSF validation controls to activate it.

Thanks.

Do you have hibernate-commons-annotations.jar in your classpath? Some of the Hibernate validations need that extra bit to work. I ran into the same issue with EAN validation.