Stripe Radar gives each charge a numerical risk score between 0 and 99, with 0 being the least risky and 99 the riskiest. By default, the blocking threshold is set to 75 - in other words, Radar will block charges with a score of 75 or greater.

Depending on your business needs you may want to customize these default thresholds. For example, your business may have low fraud rates and costs. In this case, you may want to increase the default score at which Radar blocks so that you can allow more payments overall. Alternatively, you may have a goal to decrease fraud further for your business, in which case you might want to decrease the risk score at which Radar blocks by default so that you can more aggressively block fraudulent payments.

Radar allows you to adjust the default risk score at which payments are blocked in your Radar settings:

Setting the risk score at which you block requires you to consider a tradeoff between how much fraud is blocked and how many payments are allowed by Radar. As you increase the risk score at which you block, you will allow more overall payments but you may also allow more fraud. As you decrease the risk score at which you block you will likely block more fraud but also block more overall payments. You can visit your Radar settings in the Dashboard to test the impact of changing risk score thresholds for your specific business.

Important: If you’re increasing the risk score at which charges are blocked we cannot accurately predict the impact this change will have on your fraud rate (as a number of charges that were previously blocked will now be allowed). Be careful when adjusting the risk score in this direction.

If you are using Radar for Fraud Teams changing your settings will also change the threshold at which payments are placed in manual review. And for even more control, you can use custom rules (another Radar for Fraud Teams feature) to more precisely control exactly which payments are blocked, reviewed and allowed.

You should only adjust the risk score settings if you’re comfortable with the tradeoffs you’re making for your business. Otherwise, we recommend keeping the default settings.

Next steps

Read on to learn more about risk evaluations that appear in the Dashboard and API, best practices for reviewing payments, and how to maximize machine learning performance with your integration.

• Risk Evaluation
• Review
• Integration Checklist