What are fraud checks?
Fraud checks are crucial in preventing fraudulent transactions and reducing financial losses for merchants when accepting payments online. According to Statista, fraud losses for online merchants globally is expected to grow to $48 billion by 2023.
Visa and Mastercard both recommend a layered approach to fraud prevention, including pre-authorization and post-authorization fraud checks, to help protect against fraud.
Pre-authorization
Pre-authorization fraud checks involve verifying the validity of the payment method, checking the customer's identity, and assessing the risk associated with the transaction before it is authorized. This helps prevent fraudulent transactions from being approved in the first place.
Post-authorization
Post-authorization fraud checks involve monitoring transactions after they have been authorized to identify any suspicious activity. This can include analyzing transaction data for patterns indicating fraud or conducting manual reviews of transactions flagged as potentially fraudulent.
Fraud checks within Primer
Primer has integrations with 3rd party fraud detection providers, enabling you to easily configure pre-authorization and/or post-authorization fraud checks as part of your payment flow with your preferred fraud detection provider.
Fraud checks are embedded into the authorization flow and you have flexibility over the business logic. Similarly to processing payments, Primer has simplified the setup of fraud checks through its unified framework.
Not all fraud detection providers support all payment methods. You can check payment method compatibility with your chosen fraud detection provider in the Fraud Detection Providers section of the docs.
Pre-authorization fraud checks
Pre-authorization fraud checks can have the following outcomes:
| Status | Description |
|---|---|
Pass | provider recommends you can continue to authorization |
3DS | provider recommends showing 3DS |
Reject | suspected fraud detected and the provider recommends declining the payment |
Fail | technical issue preventing the pre-authorization fraud check from being processed correctly |
You can determine how to handle all outcomes except for Reject, where this will always result in a DECLINED payment. You can choose to continue straight to authorization or to show 3DS for each outcome all within the Payment App in Workflows. See the Get Started guide for steps on how to set this up.
Post-authorization fraud checks
Post-authorization fraud checks have the following outcomes:
| Status | Description |
|---|---|
Pass | provider recommends the authorization is legitimate |
Reject | fraud risk detected and provider recommends canceling the payment |
Fail | technical issue preventing the post-authorization fraud check from being processed correctly |
Primer simplifies the configuration for post-authorization fraud checks by always canceling the payment for the Reject outcome.
See our Get Started guide for how to configure your pre-authorization and/or post-authorization fraud checks on Primer.