PayPal has supported some basic risk controls for several years now. The basic risk controls are found under the Selling Preferences heading in your PayPal Profile. They allow you to deny, accept, or accept and report transactions based on several criteria including:
- The country of origin of the transaction
- The amount of the transaction
- Whether or not the transaction was flagged by the PayPal risk model
- Whether or not the Card Verification Value (CVV) code of the card matched
- If an Address Verification Systsm (AVS) of the check was successful
PayPal has recently announced new Advanced Fraud Management Filters (FMF), available to Website Payments Pro customers for an additional $20 / month plus $0.05 / transaction. Advanced FMF includes all the basic filters plus many additional advanced filters. There is also an additional review status that you can use to put any flagged transaction into a pending state. Any pending transaction must be reviewed and accepted before the transaction can be completed. Once activated, you can manage the Advanced FMF by clicking the Fraud Management Filters link under the Selling Preferences heading in your PayPal Profile.
The advanced fraud management filters include several different categories of filters including:
- Additional Credit Card & Address Validation filters
- Checks against high risk databases of zip codes, email domains, IP address ranges, and others
- Transaction data checks for large orders, IP address velocity, and total purchase price
Shopify fully supports the new pending status of a transaction that has been flagged for review by the advanced fraud management filters. Any filter that flags a transaction for review will be displayed with warning message in the Shopify admin interface when you go to capture payment for the order. Shopify will automatically clear the review flag from the order if and when you decide to capture the payment.
Overall, Advanced Fraud Management Filters are an excellent way to custom design an easy to use risk management strategy for your company. They come complete with reports that show the performance rates of your various filters. For more information you can check out the Fraud Management Filters User Guide and The announcement on the PayPal developer blog