WooCommerce Anti-Fraud

The plugin is effective at stopping velocity attacks. But this is not the case when there is another problem on your site that is rendering it ineffective. A good analogy here is, imagine you have decided to increase security on your house by installing a deadlock on the door. You then leave home, but leaving the back door wide open. While there is increased security on the front door, it is only as effective as the weakest point in your home security.

To sum this up, where reCaptcha has been set up within our plugin, and the issue persists, it indicates one or more of the following:

-Your site has a general security vulnerability – such as non-secure hosting.
-A plugin on your website has a security vulnerability.
-Your website has been hacked and is infected with malware.

Where this is the case, the plugin will not work effectively and you will continue to experience problems.

Help with Velocity Attacks – Next Steps:

OPMC works with both non-technical e-commerce store owners, as well as developers and agency partners who are not specialised in security, to solve these issues.

We are therefore experienced in handling these various scenarios quickly and cost-effectively. Please contact us through WooCommerce.com Support selecting this plugin and we can provide prompt expert advice to resolve this matter.

WooCommerce Anti-Fraud checks for possible fraud whenever an order is placed. The outcome of this check is the output as an Order Risk Score and Order Risk Advice.

For Order Scoring and Advice:

• Low Risk – A Risk score lower than 25.
• Medium Risk – A Risk score between 25 and 75.
• High Risk – A Risk score higher than 75.

Risk Advice, Risk Score and a list of failed rules are added to the order edit display.

The Fraud Risk meta box

Risk Advice is also shown in the order overview screen as a colored shield, and the shield color is based on the level of Risk Advice.

Risk Advice color key:

• Green – Low Risk
• Orange – Medium Risk
• Red – High Risk
• Grey – No fraud check is done

By navigating to WooCommerce > Settings and clicking the Anti-Fraud tab. From here you can configure how the plugin reacts to different risk scores, what thresholds are set and who is notified. The Antifraud Settings are separated into the following sub-menus:

This section details the plugin settings.

1. General Settings
2. Rules Settings
3. Blacklist Settings
4. Email Alerts Setting
5. Rules Settings
6. reCAPTCHA Settings
7. Paypal Settings
8. MinFraud Settings
   • MinFraud Settings
   • MinFraud Insights Settings
   • MinFraud Factors Settings

Thresholds:

• Medium and high-risk thresholds – This field allows you to change what the plugin classifies as a medium-level risk or a high-level risk.
• Enable first-order check – When enabled, the plugin will include a warning if the order placed is a user’s first order. The risk score will also be affected according to the rule’s risk weight.

Pre-Purchase Assessment

• Pre-Payment Checking: By default, the order is checked after it is made on your store. This includes payment. Enable this if you want to check for fraud before allowing the user to pay.
• Add a notification message on the checkout page for customers who are blocked/cancelled/put on hold during pre-payment check due to being marked as high-risk orders.

Change Order Status based on Risk Score

• Update Order Status based on Fraud Score: Use this setting to enable the feature of auto-updating the order status based on the order score.
• Weighting to Cancel Order: Orders with a score equal to or greater than this value will be automatically cancelled.
• Weighting to On-hold Order: Orders with a score equal to or greater than this number will be automatically set on hold.

Whitelist Payment Methods

• Enable Whitelisting of Payment Methods: Setting to enable and select and whitelist payment methods.

User Roles Whitelisting

• Enable Whitelisting of User Roles: Setting to enable and select and whitelist specific user roles.

Whitelisted Emails

• Enable Whitelisting of Emails: Setting to enable and select email to whitelist.

Auto Fraud Check For Existing Orders

• Enable Auto Fraud Check: Enable this setting to check orders that already exist in the store, that is, orders made when the anti-fraud plugin was not installed or deactivated. The period of orders can be configured.

Enable Debug Logging

• Enable Debug Log: This setting is used to enable the debug log for debugging and troubleshooting purposes.

First Time Purchase Rules

Update these rules to check for new customers based on first time placing an order on your site. This can check completed orders, but also orders that did not go through and are processing.

IP, Billing and Shipping Address-based Rules

Rules set for identifying fraudulent orders triggering risks based on IP, billing and shipping addresses.

• IP Address Match: Check if address provided by the customer and IP address from where the order is placed are same.

• Billing and Shipping Address Match: Enable to identify the difference between shipping and billing addresses.

• Geo Location Match: Activate this rule to check if billing/shipping state matches the geolocation provided by the browser.

• Phone Number and Billing Country Check: Enable this rule to verify if billing country and phone number provided are same.

• Customer Behind Proxy or VPN: Check if the customer is using a proxy or behind a VPN.

Multiple Orders Attempts using Different Addresses from Same IP

Rule to check if the buyer is ordering products using different addresses from the same IP over a certain period from your store.

Origin Countries

International orders tend to have a higher fraud risk than orders that originate in your home country. Merchants often find that certain origin countries have a higher potential for fraud. These rule sets help manage such risks.

High-Risk Email Domains

Merchants often find that certain email domains have a higher potential for fraud. These Rule sets will help you manage High- Risk Email Domains. Identify High-Risk Domains by manually adding such email domains to High-Risk Domain section and/or using QuickEmailVerification.com API key to make this operation automatic.

See how to set up QuickEmail Verification API key

Order Amounts and Attempts

The rules in this section are triggered based on defined order amounts and by counting attempted orders. You can also limit orders within a certain time frame. Orders with unusually high values, or customers who make an excessive number of transactions in a short period are more likely to be fraudulent.

• Order Amount is Above Average: Check if order significantly exceeds the average order amount for your site. Set multiplier value to trigger this rule. When an order placed is value times greater than an average order.
  For example, the average order value in a store is $100 and you want to trigger this rule when an order made exceeds $500. In ‘Average Multiplier’ mention ‘5’ because 5 times $100 is $500.
• Order Exceeds Maximum Amount Limit: Limit maximum order value by enabling this rule.
  For example, if you don’t want an order to be greater than $5000. Set ‘Amount Limit($)’ to ‘5000’.
• Too many order attempts: Enable this rule to limit number of orders per user for a certain timespan (hours).
• Limit Number of Orders between Time: To limit the number of orders for a certain time duration during the day enable this rule.
  

Enabling email and IP blacklisting will capture and block all emails and IP addresses that are marked as potential fraud by WooCommerce Anti-fraud plugin. To remove any email or IP address from the blocked list, click on ‘x’ next to IP or email address and save changes.

• Email Blacklisting
• IP Blacklisting

Get alerts about suspected fraudulent activities on your store directly to the admin email, or any other email by enabling email alerts. Configure multiple email addresses to get notified when any order passes a certain threshold.

Email Notification Score is basically a score when any order meets or exceeds this value triggers emails to specified emails.

• Enable PayPal verification – When this setting is active, all PayPal payments will require verification. A verified PayPal email address is linked with more legitimate, low-risk orders. If verification fails, the order is put on hold.
• Prevent downloads if verification fails – For WooCommerce stores which have digital downloads, this setting can be used to restrict access to the downloadable file(s) until the PayPal email is verified.
• Time spend before further attempts – This setting adjusts how many days are allowed to pass before another email is sent.
• Email body – This field allows you to customize the message that is sent to customers who need to verify their PayPal accounts.

By default Minimum MinFraud Risk Score for minFraud® integration is set to 30. It is the threshold value after which the minFraud alert is triggered in the WooCommerce antifraud plugin. Similarly, the default value of MinFraud Rule Weight is also set to 30, which is the weighting in proportion to the total per cent of fraud set for the minFraud. 

You can also customise your setting how it suits you. For example, you want minFraud to trigger when you get a score of 50, you have to set Minimum minFraud Risk Score to 50. Similarly, if you want to give minFraud more weighting, for example, 40 on Fraud risk graph that is displayed in your order then set MinFraud Rule Weight to 40.