When you refund a payment because of suspected fraud, you should indicate this reason to help our machine learning systems recognize similar cases in the future. To do so:

• When refunding from the Dashboard, choose the Refund as fraud option
• When using the API, supply reason='fraudulent' with the refund request

In addition to helping train our systems, indicating suspected fraud also adds the associated cards and email addresses to your blocklist. You can view the blocklist in your Dashboard.

To be precise, the following are added to your blocklist when refunding a payment as fraudulent:

• Card numbers
  • The card used to make the payment
  • If the payment is made using a Customer object, any other cards also stored on that customer
• Email addresses
  • The receipt_email of the payment
  • The email of the customer that the payment was created on
  • Any email addresses found in the customer or payment description fields, and in the card’s name field

Impact on risk evaluation

If a payment is attempted with a card number or email address matching an item in your blocklist, Stripe gives the new payment attempt a risk level of highest. The Dashboard view shows the blocklist as the reason for this risk level.

By default, Stripe blocks all payments with the highest risk level. However, note that Radar rules run after the risk level is assigned, and any rules customization will impact which payments are permitted to proceed.

Adding and removing items

The blocklist page lists, for each item, when and how it was added to the list. Most items are added by refunding a payment as fraudulent, and for these items the Origin column links to that payment.

You can also add items:

• By clicking the Add button on the blocklist page and entering an email address or card number. (In these cases, the Origin column indicates the user who added the item.)
• From the API by making a charge update request with fraud_details.user_report='fraudulent'. Doing so will add associated cards and emails to your blocklist.

You can remove items from your blocklist by clicking the trash can icon. If there is a particular item that is improperly blocking payments, you can find it most easily by using the Filter to look up a particular email or card number.

Next steps

• Review