As an online merchant, you should always be on the lookout for fraud. One sign of fraud is multiple purchases within a short period of time by the same user. One or two purchases per day is considered normal for most e-commerce sites. But anything over that, should trigger a manual review. When running a business, you should always err on the side of caution to prevent chargeback as a result of fraud.
What if the user uses different email addresses?
You would assume that a user is identified by their email address and you’ll be right if you’re talking about a normal user. However, seasoned fraudsters will have many email addresses at their disposable. But usually, they will not bother changing their IP address. Therefore, we can easily create a FraudLabs Pro rule in the merchant dashboard to check for total transactions by IP address.
Transaction velocity rules for IP address in FraudLabs Pro
FraudLabs Pro rules allow checking for transaction velocity by email or IP or credit card. For the purpose of this article, we’ll be looking at the IP address transaction velocity rules.
If you go to the Manage Rules page in the Merchant control panel in FraudLabs Pro, you can see that there are 4 rules you can select.
- Total Transaction By IP Address Within The Last 24 Hours Greater than [Custom Value]
- Total Transaction By IP Address Within The Last 24 Hours Less than [Custom Value]
- Total Transaction By IP Address Within The Last 7 Days Greater than [Custom Value]
- Total Transaction By IP Address Within The Last 7 Days Less than [Custom Value]
To create the rule, you just select one of the 4 available rules and key in the custom value.
The example above is a rule that we are creating to trigger manual reviews if there are more than 2 orders coming from a particular IP address within 24hrs.
Conclusion
The multitude of rules available in FraudLabs Pro makes it a very flexible and powerful fraud protection tool for online merchants. Note that the free Micro plan allows anyone to screen up to 500 orders for free every month.