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

stripe.com

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

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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…

hmm.. did you build a backtester that runs every time you test a rule ?

Isn't that exactly what the comment says?

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

#82
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You only display it to risky customers?

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

#83

I work at a company with a fairly large number of transactions and we don't really have a problem with fraud. I don't know anyone else who's really battled it either. Is it much more prevalent for certain industries and products?

I once worked at a startup that took payments on behalf of charities. Due to the pick-your-price nature of donations there'd be a lot of users who've bought or stolen credit card information testing to see which ones are still active by making charges small enough to go unnoticed.

What sucked is that the charity would then be charged a fee when the card holder reversed the transaction.

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

#84
post #77

Most merchants don't want a rule engine, or rules. Most merchants want either a declined transaction (possibly with explanation -- possibly), or an accepted one with a guarantee against chargebacks. If Stripe is sure that their models work, they should offload the chargebacks from the merchants. A friend of mine worked for a startup that did exactly that. They were sold to an online payments behemoth in about 2009.

Unsure as to why you're being downvoted... as chargeback insurance is the predominant model used by anti-fraud companies. That said, it's not necessary for Stripe to take their cut that way as they already are the payment service provider and so already have taken a cut and their model allows them to just offload risk to the client.

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

#85

Just checked our Stripe dashboard and it looks like this has quietly been doing good work for us for many months now blocking suspicious charges. It took me a few clicks to find https://dashboard.stripe.com/search/rules?rule_token=block_i... and after going through a few of them, the per-charge risk factor descriptions are really helpful too. The high-risk reasons are messages like: "This card has been used from an u…

Usually fraud systems are black boxes to prevent abuse, not because they can't be human readable. I agree however that to my eye it does usually seem excessively black-box, as it's not like most fraudsters are idiots, they already know what tools are arrayed against them.

If a system requires that it be a black box to prevent abuse, you should use another system. A black box with flaws that allow abuse is difficult to fix. With an open, auditable system, methods of abuse are more easily exposed and fixed.

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

#86
post #84
post #77

Most merchants don't want a rule engine, or rules. Most merchants want either a declined transaction (possibly with explanation -- possibly), or an accepted one with a guarantee against chargebacks. If Stripe is sure that their models work, they should offload the chargebacks from the merchants. A friend of mine worked for a startup that did exactly that. They were sold to an online payments behemoth in about 2009.

Unsure as to why you're being downvoted... as chargeback insurance is the predominant model used by anti-fraud companies. That said, it's not necessary for Stripe to take their cut that way as they already are the payment service provider and so already have taken a cut and their model allows them to just offload risk to the client.

If they limit themselves to be "payment service provider" it's not clear how this anti-fraud stuff really fits into their model.

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

#87

Just checked our Stripe dashboard and it looks like this has quietly been doing good work for us for many months now blocking suspicious charges. It took me a few clicks to find https://dashboard.stripe.com/search/rules?rule_token=block_i... and after going through a few of them, the per-charge risk factor descriptions are really helpful too. The high-risk reasons are messages like: "This card has been used from an u…

"Primary risk factor: The country where this card was issued (EC) does not match the country where the payment was made (US)."

This has become clear now....but Stripe has thus been blocking legitimate payments from our users with no insight for us

80% of our clients are travelling at the time of purchase... Now we understand why we were getting so many BLOCKED transactions!!

Although this is a welcome addition, a heads up would have been nice...

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

#88

I think the "golden age" of online fraud is coming to an end quickly. I've posted quite heavily on Stripe and fraud threads on HN previously if you want to read my comment history. This is a big step for Stripe. I've often asked why they didn't have an integration with MaxMind or SiftScience already set up. They've been building their own behind-the-scenes the entire time! This feature is fantastic if you are a merch…

Is it something different from the /tokens endpoint? Do they have any protection against pushing your data directly that way?

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

#89

I think the "golden age" of online fraud is coming to an end quickly. I've posted quite heavily on Stripe and fraud threads on HN previously if you want to read my comment history. This is a big step for Stripe. I've often asked why they didn't have an integration with MaxMind or SiftScience already set up. They've been building their own behind-the-scenes the entire time! This feature is fantastic if you are a merch…

Using Spreedy to act as a 'white' proxy to their API would make it an even harder job for Stripe to detect the fraudsters. What would be your solution to the problem?

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

#90
post #67

I work at a company with a fairly large number of transactions and we don't really have a problem with fraud. I don't know anyone else who's really battled it either. Is it much more prevalent for certain industries and products?

The most common scenario where we experience credit card fraud is high value items ($500+) and a freight forwarder. The scammer orders the item, using the billing address of the legitimate owner of the card, but a shipping address that corresponds with a freight forwarding operation. These places offer a US address, but forward the shipments on to various places, including South America, islands in the Caribbean, etc…

I understand your concerns as seller, but as a buyer located outside the US, blacklisting freight forwarders is really annoying, as it blocks access to legitimate buyers as well.

The government-owned postal service in New Zealand, NZPost, run a service known as YouShop https://www.nzpost.co.nz/tools/youshop specifically to allow Kiwis to get access to products that are either only sold overseas, or would cost ridiculous amounts of money to ship via those sellers. They operate by providing a personal address in US, the EU, or China, backed by third-party freight forwarders.

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