Live data from Hacker News

Radar – A new set of integrated tools to help prevent fraud

stripe.com

51–60 of 120 posts

Re: Radar – A new set of integrated tools to help prevent fraud

#52
> On its own, a bimodal distribution does not tell you that a model is good. (A vacuous model that randomly assigns probabilities of just 0.0 and 1.0 would also have a bimodal score distribution.) However, in the presence of evidence that transactions with a low score are not fraudulent and transactions with a high score are fraudulent, an increasingly bimodal distribution is a sign of improved efficacy for a model.

To do this more precisely, a scoring rule (https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Scoring_rule) gives a system credit for both (1) making accurate predictions and (2) being confident at the right times.

Re: Radar – A new set of integrated tools to help prevent fraud

#53
post #32

This looks very promising. Stripe seems to have sometimes let surprising payments through up to now, even with all the card details security checks they provided activated, and they've never supported 3-D Secure. They've also suffered from surprisingly high rates of unexpected declined charges in our experience. Hopefully if they're now rolling out more comprehensive fraud protection, that will go some way to address…

We had the same experience, unfortunately most of stripes "declined" charges are actually declined by the bank and stripe cannot, nor is willing to help you out. They are just a gateway. Once it happened on my own site with my own card, I called my bank's security team and asked what is the exact reason on their side and all they could tell me over the phone that they declined the transaction only because it was too…

Agreed on pretty much all of that. We too have wondered whether the ease of use that makes Stripe so attractive to a small business might also induce some sort of penalty in terms of fraud checks by other organisations. If that really is the case, presumably it leaves Stripe in a tough situation, but this seems like a responsible and hopefully effective step on their part.

We see quite a lot of failures on the second month of a subscription, particularly for customers abroad (we're in the UK). We also tend to see these sort of failed charges happen in waves, with few problems for a while but then a sudden spike in declined transactions. That suggests at least one plausible explanation: the lack of CV2 after that first charge may be enough to tip something over the edge into "too suspicious" territory following some sort of update in the overall scoring scheme used by whoever is blocking the charge.

We're looking into various potential ways to improve the situation, such as allowing more automated retries of failed charges over a longer period before we give up, and possibly advertising prices in our customers' local currencies. However, each of those has some potential downsides and obviously there is only so much you can do as the merchant anyway.

If Radar can start to make Stripe, and by extension its merchants, a harder target for for fraudsters, maybe that will also move the needle a bit. A few times I think we've lost more subscribers in a month to failed card charges than everything else put together, including customers actively choosing to cancel and including failures via all other payment methods we accept, so it's definitely an issue worth exploring.

Re: Radar – A new set of integrated tools to help prevent fraud

#54

This looks very promising. Stripe seems to have sometimes let surprising payments through up to now, even with all the card details security checks they provided activated, and they've never supported 3-D Secure. They've also suffered from surprisingly high rates of unexpected declined charges in our experience. Hopefully if they're now rolling out more comprehensive fraud protection, that will go some way to address…

> they've never supported 3-D Secure That's a feature. It's a horrible system which I wish nobody ever used. I've literally never been able to successfully complete a transaction.

I've experienced 3D secure and verified by visa effectively insulating a merchant from chargeback risk (I'm talking 99% success rates winning chargebacks). You're right, it is incredibly user-hostile and truly painful to integrate (as compared to Stripe) but if you're in a business that sees a lot of people trying to rip you off it works wonders.

Re: Radar – A new set of integrated tools to help prevent fraud

#55
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data is from Stripe's handling of 100,000+ businesses' transactions, probably a better dataset than SiftScience. That's a big probably .

doubtful that stripe has 100,000+ business customers. Kount is another good one, that's what Braintree uses apparently.

Why do you think it's doubtful?

They're processing around 100M API requests a day. https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/788752160284487680

Re: Radar – A new set of integrated tools to help prevent fraud

#58
post #13

It's a bit unclear to me; these rules appear to be automated but then they show a rule builder interface? How would I ever know if the rule I've built is too constraining, or too loose in accepting payments? Payment is not exactly an area of my business that I want to do a lot of trial and error..

(I work at Stripe) Stripe's already actioning charges based on the feedback from the machine learning models. We hope that they'll take care of most fraud for you. If you do want to write custom rules on top of what the models are doing, we've actually built in a testing interface to the rule creation process. When you test a rule, we'll actually simulate what the rule would have done had it been active for the past…

> we've actually built in a testing interface to the rule creation process. When you test a rule, we'll actually simulate what the rule would have done had it been active for the past 6 months.

That is slick.

Re: Radar – A new set of integrated tools to help prevent fraud

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they've never supported 3-D Secure That's a feature. It's a horrible system which I wish nobody ever used. I've literally never been able to successfully complete a transaction.

I've experienced 3D secure and verified by visa effectively insulating a merchant from chargeback risk (I'm talking 99% success rates winning chargebacks). You're right, it is incredibly user-hostile and truly painful to integrate (as compared to Stripe) but if you're in a business that sees a lot of people trying to rip you off it works wonders.

It works wonders in eliminating chargebacks by also eliminating legitimate customers?

Re: Radar – A new set of integrated tools to help prevent fraud

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I work on Radar at Stripe) thank you, and do let me know if there's anything we can do to help you get set up on Radar. Additionally, we actually do support 3Dsecure in private beta -- mind emailing me (tara@stripe.com) for access?

Please please please promise that it will always stay optional?

From playing around with it a bit, it appears you can disable any and all rules, if you want.
Post reply on HN