Configure Fraud and Spam 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

Steps to Enhance Protection

Mandatory Spam Protection

P2P Fundraiser Email Verification

API Authentication Requirements

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 is 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 Raisely'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.

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 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.

Mandatory Spam Protection

In addition to financial fraud monitoring, Raisely provides built-in spam protection to prevent malicious bots from spamming your campaign with fake signups or blog posts. 

Note: While no web-based form can block 100% of sophisticated spam, these settings provide an increased layer of mitigation to stop the majority of bot activity.

P2P Fundraiser Email Verification

How it works:

If the fundraiser tries to log in before completing verification, they will be directed back to the verification screen. They can request another verification email from that screen.

Until verification is complete:

• The fundraiser cannot access their fundraiser dashboard.
• Their fundraiser profile is not publicly accessible.
• They do not appear on leaderboards or other public campaign elements.
• Blog posts or content connected to the profile are not publicly visible.
• Their Fundraiser Welcome message may be held until verification is complete.

Note: Pending profiles remain visible to organisation administrators under Campaign → Profiles.

Can email verification be disabled?

Help a Fundraiser Complete Verification

If a legitimate fundraiser cannot find or use the verification email:

1. Ask them to check their spam or junk folder.
2. Confirm that they entered the correct email address.
3. Ask them to select Resend email on the verification or login screen.
4. Confirm that the campaign’s Account Confirmation message is active.
5. Check that the campaign’s sending domain is configured correctly.

If the fundraiser still cannot complete verification, an organisation administrator can manually verify the profile:

1. Open the campaign in Raisely Admin.
2. Select Profiles.
3. Filter for profiles pending verification, if needed.
4. Locate the fundraiser.
5. Select Verify.

Manual verification is restricted to organisation administrators. Only use it after confirming that the profile belongs to a legitimate fundraiser.
 

Form Name Field Validation

Raisely applies additional validation to name fields on signup, lead and ticket forms. Additional front-end validations are now in place to help reduce spam submissions and keep your supporter data clean.

These changes do not affect donors or supporters entering legitimate names, and there are no changes to API behaviour for organisations using custom integrations.

If you or a supporter run into any unexpected issues with a form, please do not hesitate to reach out to our support team and we will be happy to help.

Keyword blocking (profiles & blog posts)

To help reduce spam content, Raisely may block a fundraiser profile or blog post from being saved if it contains words or phrases commonly used in spam or scam posts. 

Spam-filter exceptions allow an organisation to approve specific legitimate words or phrases. They do not turn off Raisely’s broader spam protection.

How it works:

• The check runs when someone creates or updates a fundraiser profile or blog post (e.g. name, description, and body/content fields).
• If blocked, the content won't save until the wording is updated.
• This check is not retroactive (it won't scan content that's already live), and it does not apply to donations, comments, or messages.

What fundraisers will see:

If a blocked term is detected, they'll see an error such as:

"This content looks like spam. Please edit before you can submit, or contact support for help."

If legitimate content is blocked:

Occasionally, genuine campaigns may use terms that overlap with spam patterns. If this happens, you can go to Campaign Settings → Fraud Protection → Spam filter exceptions and enter the specific words and phrases that you would like our system to treat as safe and allowed through:

Spam fraud protection: API authentication requirements

{
  "data": {
    "user": {
      "firstName": "Jordan",
      "lastName": "Example",
      "email": "jordan@example.com",
      "password": "AtLeast12Chars!"
    },
    "profile": { "name": "Jordan Example", "type": "INDIVIDUAL", "currency": "AUD" }
  }
}

"categoryPath": "lead-form-submitted"

POST /v3/users/upsert?campaign=<campaign-uuid>
Authorization: Bearer raisely-sk-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

{
  "data": {
    "email": "jordan@example.com",
    "firstName": "Jordan",
    "lastName": "Example",
    "interaction": {
      "categoryPath": "lead-form-submitted",
      "detail": { "private": { "formName": "Stay in touch" } }
    }
  }
}

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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