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by tyingq 3809 days ago
Your description does not match Stripe's documentation. Specifically, there's no mention of matching geo-IP to billing address.

The problem I see with Stripe's fraud prevention is that it appears to be "all or none", with no visibility or control on our end.

The only control knob appears to be whether to allow Stripe to automatically decline things it thinks are fraud. It doesn't appear to provide any detail on why it thought something was fraud.

So it seems to leave two choices:

- Allow stripe to decline things, and try to address false positives manually. There is no "go ahead and charge this button", by the way...you would have to contact the customer.

- Set stripe not to decline things, but lose even the limited visibility to "stripe would have declined this".

The real problem, in my mind, is that fraud risk for both the banks and providers like Stripe is really small. You risk very little.

The vast majority of the cost goes back the individual merchants/sellers, who have the least visibility into what the risk of an individual transaction is.

Thus, there's very little incentive for the banks, or stripe, to provide decent tools. A shame, because your ability to see the bigger pictures means your tools would always be better than anything we can use.

1 comments

We've been thinking about (and working on) a lot of these issues--we're definitely aware that users would like (totally reasonably!) more visibility and control. If you have any more feedback, I'd love to hear it!
Appreciate the response. I suppose the most simple change would be visibility to "would have declined" if the "automatically decline detected fraud" buttons are set to off.

That would allow the flexibility for merchants to make their own decisions without the hassle of manually dealing with false positives. The trouble with the false positives is that you have to talk the customer into entering all their data again, without having anything specific to tell them, like "Er, you were declined, but I have no idea why...can you try again?".

Adyen does a good job providing a developer-centric platform with robust controls around fraud rules and other elements. I'd encourage you to benchmark them. You and your colleagues can also drop me an email anytime to discuss: ben.brown@firstannapolis.com.