Set Thresholds for the Risk Score

The risk score is a signal as to whether an online transaction is risky for your business. Determining the thresholds you set for different actions requires fine tuning over time. We recommend first considering the cost of fraud and potentially lost goods or services, the cost of manual review, and the cost of rejecting good transactions. The risk strategy relevant to your business may mean more or less tolerance for risk as you begin using the risk score.

One possible strategy is to at first only automatically accept transactions under a low risk score (e.g., 5.00), only automatically reject orders above a high risk score (e.g., 50.00), and manually review all other transactions. After monitoring the risk scores received for the manually reviewed transactions, you can adjust the thresholds appropriately to reduce the amount of manual review required. Learn more about setting a disposition for transactions based on the risk score and other values.

Below is the distribution of risk scores returned by the minFraud service across all users. You can use this data to estimate the number of transactions that will be approved, rejected, or held back for review given the thresholds you set. Please note that the distribution of risk scores you observe may differ depending on the risk profile of your business.

Risk score Orders  
0.10 – 0.49 70% Risk_score_vs_transactions.png
This graph approximates the distribution of risk scores across all transactions in the minFraud Network. The majority of transactions have a risk score less than 0.5.
0.50 – 0.99 13%
1 – 1.99 7%
2 – 4.99 4%
5 – 9.99 2%
10 – 49.99 2%
50.00+ 2%

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