<story><title>Improved fraud prevention with Radar 2.0</title><url>https://stripe.com/blog/radar-2018</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sixhobbits</author><text>I really hope that this improves the false-positive rate, as mentioned in another comment.&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;ve been hurt badly as a startup breaking into the US market and getting many of our genuine charges blocked by Radar (and at a &amp;quot;highest risk&amp;quot; level where it is not possible to disable rules).&lt;p&gt;As a developer, I had the best possible impression of Stripe, as they provide easily the cleanest API and best documentation of any payment provider I&amp;#x27;ve used.&lt;p&gt;From a business side, it was highly frustrating losing so many of our early US sales. A lot of this was due to US banks blocking the payment, but Stripe did not handle these cases well in our case.&lt;p&gt;* Error messages presented to the customer are often ambiguous or misleading, and if you&amp;#x27;re using checkout.js you cannot customize these easily. In some cases, the customer gets a client-side &amp;quot;Card is declined&amp;quot; error, with no communication passed through to the merchant at all, which makes telephone support very difficult.&lt;p&gt;* Stripe will not provide any kind of telephone or chat support to merchants. By the time a specific blocked payment can be escalated to a &amp;quot;fraud specialist&amp;quot; the customer is usually long gone.&lt;p&gt;* Stripe will not allow you disable certain Radar rules.&lt;p&gt;* If a user tries to pay several times (due to their bank blocking the payment as suspicious), and then phones their bank to clear the payment, Stripe will often then block the payment due to &amp;quot;repeated attempted uses of the card&amp;quot;. This is highly frustrating as even very determined customers who try several times and then contact their bank to resolve the issue there still get blocked by Stripe, and usually give up at that point.&lt;p&gt;* We had one payment blocked by Radar due to it being from a &amp;quot;high risk location&amp;quot; (Pakistan if I remember correctly). This represented unacceptable levels of discrimination for us. Machine learning and probability is useful, but ethically it&amp;#x27;s hugely problematic to deny people service based on their country, race, gender, age, or other attributes that they do not have control over.&lt;p&gt;My early experiences with PayPal were nothing short of terrible, but BrainTree is looking like a more and more attractive alternative to Stripe, especially with the PayPal integration built in -- if people have issues with their Credit Card they can simply pay with PayPal credit instead.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>freehunter</author><text>&amp;gt;We had one payment blocked by Radar due to it being from a &amp;quot;high risk location&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;This, to me, represents the worst that banking fraud protection has to offer. Just yesterday I (from the USA) tried to purchase a software license for a tool I&amp;#x27;ve been using the free version of for a long time. My card was declined, so I used my American Express. About two hours later, I got a call from my bank&amp;#x27;s fraud department saying they had blocked a transaction to the UK for fraud prevention, and disabled my card to protect me. Apparently the bank (a small US-based bank) block any transaction in the UK as it&amp;#x27;s a &amp;quot;high risk country&amp;quot;... I&amp;#x27;m sorry, but this is the Internet. No one cares where the company is located, and I have no way of knowing beforehand that the payment is processed by Stripe US or Stripe UK. Blocking entire countries for fraud prevention is a really lazy way of doing fraud prevention.&lt;p&gt;But I&amp;#x27;ve even seen worse at another bank. My area of the US doesn&amp;#x27;t have Publix grocery stores. Apparently this bank considered shopping at Publix to be unacceptable risk when I was traveling for work, and disabled my debit card because of this. Stopping at Walgreens beforehand and getting dinner the night before wasn&amp;#x27;t suspicious though.&lt;p&gt;Bank fraud is a hard problem, and taking lazy solutions doesn&amp;#x27;t solve that problem. It just hurts customers and hurts businesses.</text></comment>
<story><title>Improved fraud prevention with Radar 2.0</title><url>https://stripe.com/blog/radar-2018</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sixhobbits</author><text>I really hope that this improves the false-positive rate, as mentioned in another comment.&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;ve been hurt badly as a startup breaking into the US market and getting many of our genuine charges blocked by Radar (and at a &amp;quot;highest risk&amp;quot; level where it is not possible to disable rules).&lt;p&gt;As a developer, I had the best possible impression of Stripe, as they provide easily the cleanest API and best documentation of any payment provider I&amp;#x27;ve used.&lt;p&gt;From a business side, it was highly frustrating losing so many of our early US sales. A lot of this was due to US banks blocking the payment, but Stripe did not handle these cases well in our case.&lt;p&gt;* Error messages presented to the customer are often ambiguous or misleading, and if you&amp;#x27;re using checkout.js you cannot customize these easily. In some cases, the customer gets a client-side &amp;quot;Card is declined&amp;quot; error, with no communication passed through to the merchant at all, which makes telephone support very difficult.&lt;p&gt;* Stripe will not provide any kind of telephone or chat support to merchants. By the time a specific blocked payment can be escalated to a &amp;quot;fraud specialist&amp;quot; the customer is usually long gone.&lt;p&gt;* Stripe will not allow you disable certain Radar rules.&lt;p&gt;* If a user tries to pay several times (due to their bank blocking the payment as suspicious), and then phones their bank to clear the payment, Stripe will often then block the payment due to &amp;quot;repeated attempted uses of the card&amp;quot;. This is highly frustrating as even very determined customers who try several times and then contact their bank to resolve the issue there still get blocked by Stripe, and usually give up at that point.&lt;p&gt;* We had one payment blocked by Radar due to it being from a &amp;quot;high risk location&amp;quot; (Pakistan if I remember correctly). This represented unacceptable levels of discrimination for us. Machine learning and probability is useful, but ethically it&amp;#x27;s hugely problematic to deny people service based on their country, race, gender, age, or other attributes that they do not have control over.&lt;p&gt;My early experiences with PayPal were nothing short of terrible, but BrainTree is looking like a more and more attractive alternative to Stripe, especially with the PayPal integration built in -- if people have issues with their Credit Card they can simply pay with PayPal credit instead.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>globile</author><text>Agree. We have a non-US Stripe account, so we are heavily penalised when we try to charge the US market.&lt;p&gt;Large percentage of support calls start with &amp;quot;my bank blocked the transaction because it was international &amp;#x2F; fraud&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Incorporating in the US is not a feasible option. This is where Stripe&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;Global&amp;quot; reach and 150 currencies loses a bit of power.&lt;p&gt;Would be great if there was a way non-US stripe merchants could bill us customers as if they were in the US. Sure it is more of a regulatory&amp;#x2F;legal issue than a technical one.</text></comment>