HACKER Q&A
📣 saradhi

High Biases in Stripe-Radar?


Following high (10.57%) USD-INR transaction fee on PayPal [1]. We, recently, implemented Stripe payments and found that the Stripe-Radar is hindering the subscriptions. Yesterday, we experienced 2-digit "Blocked" payments because of "High Risk". I upgraded my account to see the reasoning, after evaluating the failures it seems the Stripe-Radar is highly biased to the distance between payment-session-ip-address and card-billing-address.

A card transaction with an 11-mile distance & no history of frauds/disputes has a RiskScore of 87. The transaction is blocked as the account by default comes with RiskScore threshold of 75.

There are "Allow Rules" on the Stripe-Radar, that are disabled as the account should meet 2K USD/month. We have been consistently doing over 15K USD/month on other gateways, and Stripe doesn't want to consider the transactions statement to enable the option for new accounts.

Has anyone come across a similar situation? How did you handle it?

[1]. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32228267

  👤 edwinwee Accepted Answer ✓
Allow Rules, if not implemented properly, could open a vector for fraud. That's why, for now, it's not enabled for newer businesses on Stripe—and we ask businesses to contact support to turn it on manually (https://support.stripe.com/). Would you be able to get in touch with us? (Please CC me, edwin@stripe.com.) We'd also like to look into why these payments were blocked in the first place (distance between IP address and card address is not the sole factor for risk scores; there are many factors) and make sure future legitimate payments are accepted.