Configure Fraud Protection
The more people know about your campaign, the greater the chance that a malicious actor may find it.
Raisely continues to make substantial improvements to our anti-fraud measures to prevent malicious activity. These improvements, along with Stripe's fraud-prevention Radar, are usually enough to keep your campaign from being used for card testing.
Though even with these protections in place, you might open your campaign dashboard to see a fraudulent activity message. So let's explore ways you can enhance your campaign's security.
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Understanding Fraudulent transactions
Identifying Fraudulent Transactions
Understanding Fraudulent Transactions
Donation sites are popular with fraudsters, often used to check the validity of stolen credit cards. They attempt to make a small donation to test if the credit card they are still valid, or if the bank has blocked/removed the card.
The donation amount is usually quite small (less than $10) in order to avoid detection by both the card owner and the bank. Once they validate the card is still working, they go on to use the card to make larger purchases elsewhere.
Raisely will block suspicious donation attempts in order to protect your campaign from scammers and credit card testers. If you see a warning appear on the dashboard, it's usually a sign that the system is working just fine.
Though we recommend you check your recent donations in case:
- The transactions were legitimate donations, and you need those donations processed, OR
- Not all of the fraudulent donations were caught by our filters
Steps to Enhance Protection
Raisely allows you to optimise fraud protection to suit your needs. These settings only affect Raisley's fraud protection systems. If a donation is blocked by Stripe or PayPal, you'll have to contact them for further information.
To access your fraud protection settings, from the campaign sidebar, select Settings > Fraud Protection. Here are the settings explained:
Fraud Protection (Disable)
If you're running a fundraising event, or just taking lots of small donations in the same location, this could trip our anti-fraud protection and cause donations to be blocked. You may want to temporarily disable fraud protection to prevent this.
If you're concerned you might forget to turn it back on, don't be; we don't allow fraud protection to be disabled indefinitely, and the system will automatically re-enable it after 24 hours.
Donation Form Captcha
When enabled, our code runs in the background on the browser to solve a mathematical challenge. It takes a few seconds, but so does filling out the donation form, so the challenge is usually completed by the time the user clicks “Donate”. But when a fraudster sets up automation to test lots of cards, they’re trying to fill in the form repeatedly quickly and so this slow down makes it unproductive, and if they try to work around it by opening multiple tabs, it will start to bog down their computer and the time it takes for the challenge to complete will be multiplied by the number of tabs they open.
** This is not to be mistaken with Google's ReCaptcha.
Minimum Donation Amount
This setting can be very useful if you are experiencing sustained, high volume, low-value donation attempts. It allows you to nominate a minimum donation amount for your campaign. Any attempts to donate below this value will be automatically blocked regardless of any surrounding information or data.
If your campaign frequently receives lower-value donations, keep in mind that this setting can inadvertently block legitimate donations. So if you do enable this setting carefully consider this and the average donation amount that your campaign is currently receiving.
Enhanced Card Testing Protection
Enhanced Card Testing Protection takes a more aggressive approach to identifying suspicious transactions. If you're finding that card testers are making donations that aren't getting blocked, enabling this should help.
You can keep enhanced protection on for as long as you like, or indefinitely, but be sure to take a look at the blocked donations once in a while to make sure it's not stopping legitimate donors.
Identifying Fraudulent Transactions
You can filter your transaction listings to see only those flagged as fraudulent. From your campaign sidebar, select Donations > then click Filter (top bar) > Fraudulent. You can identify who blocked a suspicious donation by clicking it and checking the note at the top of the donation details.
For example, this donation was blocked by Raisely:
And here is a donation that was blocked by the Payment Gateway (in this case - Stripe):
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