PayPal Fraud Tools

Overview of PayPal Fraud Tools

PayPal Fraud Management Filters (FMF) provide you with tools - called filters - that can identify potentially fraudulent transactions. Fraud management filters are divided into the following categories:

• Free filters include basic filters that screen against the country of origin, the value of transactions, and such. PayPal provides basic filters for business accounts and Website Payments Pro accounts.
• Advanced filters include filters that screen credit card and addresses information, filters that screen against lists of high-risk indicators, and filters that screen additional transaction characteristics. Website Payments Pro merchants can upgrade to use advanced filters.
  Note: Using advanced filters may incur additional charges.

The following diagram shows how Fraud Management Filters work in three steps:

1. Configure your Fraud Management Filters to either flag, hold for review, or deny riskier payments.
2. Based on your settings your filters will review incoming payments.
3. Your filters automatically flag, deny, or hold payments for review; typically, most payments are accepted because they do not show characteristics indicating fraud

Free filters, which are available to all accounts, have the following options: 1)  the maximum transaction amount you will accept from a customer,  2) which countries you will or will not accept payments from, and 3) whether you will accept payments from unconfirmed addresses.

Advanced filters, which are available to Website Payment Pro accounts for a monthly fee of $20 plus 5 cents per transaction, offer several more fine-grained controls covering things such as AVS/CVV return values, email address domains, IP address ranges, plus what action to take when a transaction is flagged by PayPal's internal fraud models.

Each set of filters (Free or Advanced) gives you three options for the action to take when a filter is triggered. The first two are "accept" or "deny". The third option is "review", which will put the transaction in Pending status and allow you to manually review the transaction to choose if you wish to accept or deny the payment. This step has to be done through your PayPal account.

Integration with PayPal Standard

FMF triggered option	Payment behavior in your WA account	WA admin options/actions
Accept	Payment successfully completed.	No additional action required.
Flag	Payment successfully completed.	You can see this payment in your PayPal account as Flagged.
Deny	Payment failed. This error will appear during payment attempt on PayPal site. User cannot leave PayPal site. If user clicks Back button in the browser he will see "Please Wait" screen with Cancel Waiting button.	You can see this payment in your PayPal account as Denied.
Review	Payment successfully completed, but corresponding payment transaction is in Pending state. After receiving PayPal notification (Completed or Denied) in your WA account, payment transaction status will be changed to Completed or Refunded.	Be Careful This payment has to be accepted or denied in your PayPal account. After this, payment will be either Completed or Denied. No additional actions required in your WA account.