Challenge

DeNA launched DeNA Pay, a digital wallet for millions of customers across its sports, gaming, and healthcare services. The service supports credit card and convenience store top-ups, with sports venues among the first locations to go live. Almost immediately, the team detected fraudulent transactions.

Launching a new payment service means navigating fraud from day one. The team immediately introduced mandatory 3D Secure authentication for payments, significantly reducing fraud, but the impact of the fraudulent activity also reduced authorization rates for legitimate customers.

Customers trying to top up their balances were getting declined, and support teams could only advise them to retry with a different amount or card. With the sports season approaching, the pressure to resolve authorization issues was mounting.

Solution

DeNA Pay was the company’s first virtual prepaid card service, and the team had planned from the outset to work with dedicated support. When fraud surfaced after launch, DeNA activated Premium Support in January 2025 and brought on Stripe Radar for Fraud Teams to build targeted defenses.

Stopping fraud without turning away legitimate customers required a different approach. Premium Support gave the team a clear picture of its fraud patterns and helped build targeted defenses, including optimized Radar rules that balanced fraud prevention against authorization rates. Fraudulent actors changed their tactics repeatedly, and the team worked with Stripe over several months to adjust their Radar rules in response.

“The Stripe team would propose Radar rules on the spot in response to our questions. Their depth of expertise made a real difference,” said Mariko Goto, group manager, planning and promotion group, customer & common platform promotion department, enterprise business division, solutions headquarters.

As part of its fraud response, DeNA cleaned up fraudulent accounts and removed suspicious merchants from its platform, while Radar blocked fraudulent transactions automatically. As fraud tactics shifted, the team used Radar’s built-in tools to strengthen its defenses. When the team added convenience store payments after launch, they consulted Premium Support to configure the new payment method, completing the rollout quickly.

Beyond advising on fraud rules, Premium Support gave the team a sounding board for broader decisions. “We could check immediately whether the approaches we’d developed on our own were on the right track,” said Yoshinari Tanaka, department manager, customer & common platform promotion department, enterprise business division, solutions headquarters. “Being able to consult Stripe on even small questions meant we could move faster on every measure.”

Results

DeNA Pay balance top-up payment authorization rates increase by approximately 10%

Results came quickly. Within 3 months, measures including the refined 3D Secure configuration helped improve DeNA Pay’s payment authorization rate by approximately 10%, with rates fully recovering shortly after.

“If we’d been handling this on our own, the impact of the fraud would likely have dragged on much longer. Premium Support helped us turn things around quickly,” Tanaka said.

DeNA Pay strengthens fraud defenses and improves service quality

As DeNA built out custom Radar rules, immediate access to the Premium Support team allowed the company to validate its approach and get expert input without delay—improving service quality across DeNA Pay.

Payment-related support inquiries drop by 80%

In March 2025, DeNA set up a dedicated DeNA Pay support booth at sports venues to help customers with the new service. As authorization rates recovered and fraud declined, the volume of “can’t top up” inquiries gradually decreased.

The team plans to adopt new Stripe features as appropriate. Looking ahead, DeNA sees potential in using Stripe’s payment data for marketing analytics and fraud prevention across the broader DeNA account system.