The minFraud service can be used to score a wide variety of transaction types, from all kinds of businesses, from every country in the world. This includes:
- e-commerce transactions
- account creation and login
- referral
- banking transfers
- password resets
- and more
The minFraud service has a number of transaction types that can be specified when you query the service. You can get a full list of the pre-defined transaction types in our developer documentation. But even if your transaction type is not in our list, the minFraud service can be used to score any type of transaction that has data associated with one or more of the minFraud inputs.
Types of transaction data
The minFraud services can accept the following kinds of transaction data:
- information about the device the end user or customer uses to conduct the transaction, including IP address and browser data,
- the billing and shipping addresses provided by the end user or customer for the transaction,
- credit card information and information provided by your payment processor,
- the email address provided by the end user or customer,
- information about the transaction event, such as the storefront where the transaction occurred and information about the transactor's account,
- and information about the transaction event in your system, including the user account and order.
In addition to these inputs, the minFraud service allows you to provide custom inputs. These inputs are not used for risk scoring, but they can be incorporated into custom rules, or recorded as part of your minFraud transaction records for your own information. Learn more about custom rules.
Passing relevant transaction data
In general, we recommend passing minFraud as much input data as possible to receive the most accurate scoring. Learn more about the most valuable inputs for minFraud scoring. Even if you are not able to pass all of the recommended inputs, the minFraud service would still be able to return scoring based on other factors.
For example, though you may not be able to pass the IIN or all of the billing address inputs for a PayPal transaction, the minFraud service would still be able to return scoring based on factors such as geolocation checks, IP address reputation, device information, email reputation, and fraud patterns detected across the minFraud Network.
Limitations to minFraud's data analysis
The minFraud service cannot identify whether a person placing an order lives at the given address (or uses the given credit card or phone number). We do not collect full credit card numbers, so we cannot perform address verifications.
When scoring e-commerce transactions, the minFraud service is most effective in detecting stolen card fraud. The minFraud service does not protect against “friendly” chargebacks–where the cardholder placed the order, but later denies having placed the order, and requests a chargeback.
MaxMind does not provide a guarantee or service to compensate our customers for chargebacks. If you are experiencing chargeback issues or false positives, please review our integration and testing guide for tips on making minFraud as effective as possible and feel free to reach out to our support team to discuss your use case.
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