What's a Fraud Score?

A look into the risk engine and why it's important.

If you open the details section for any transaction, you might notice a section named "Fraud Score".

Every transaction we process is assigned a fraud score by the automated risk engine. The fraud score gives you an idea of how likely the transaction is to turn out to be a fraudulent one. It can have practically any value, but generally you will see an integer somewhere between -200 and 200.

The risk engine assigns the fraud scores based on a very large set of competing rules, some of which increase the fraud score, and others reduce it. If the transaction does not trigger any rules at all, the score will be 0. If the transaction triggers the rules that indicate fraudulent behavior, the score will go up, and vice-versa. Lower the score, the better. Score less than 0 is excellent.

The most important thing to understand about it is that if a transaction has a fraud score above a threshold, it is automatically blocked by the system as being too risky. You will see such transactions with Status as Failed, and Failure Reason as FRAUD. The purpose of this blocking is to reduce the chances of a transaction being raised as a chargeback.

In the rare case you believe that the transaction has been blocked in error, or the user contacts you with a genuine reason as to why their transaction may have been blocked as fraudulent (for example, they used a blocked card by mistake), please contact us and we can manually whitelist such a user.