The Fraud dashboard and filters in my account do not work at all. They have been providing inconsistent and contradictory data for months now. We've been hit with repeated stolen cards in the last 6 months and the fraud filters can't even properly report actual the number of chargebacks and transaction denials that are in right there in the Paypal System. So I opened a case for this about 6 months ago, and was told it was 'escalated' and they'd let me know. After 2 such messages telling me to 'hold on', I never heard from them again. Apparently Paypal has no capable tech support.
Regarding the fraud slider and its 'test' button... it supposedly runs a simulation and compares the current filter settings to past transactions. Great idea. How well would these settings work on my actual past transactions? Would they deny the transactions that should be denied? Deny too many? First, let's try running the test with its CURRENT settings (or moving just slightly one direction or the other) and see if its results agree with what Paypal ACTUALLY DID in terms of denials. Nope! Totally different than real result. In other words, say we had 2 chargebacks and 30 card transaction denials in the last 30 days; I run the 'test' and it says "0 chargebacks, 0 denials." Are you kidding? This 'test' is totally worthless! Apparently it's just a 'black box' to make us think we are protected here.
Regarding the toggle filters underneath. First of all, how about something as simple as denying cards on the basis on not having a Name Match to the card holder? Sounds like a no brainer. But leave it to Paypal to omit this one! BTW I know it's omitted because we've had chargebacks due to Unauthorized Transaction where the actual card holder turned out to be a completely different name than what was submitted on the billing info! The transactions went right on through.
Another massive failure: the filters that are there are poorly explained. I've asked tech support the difference between AVS Partial Match and AVS No Match twice. No answer. Try reading the descriptions and you'll see that both would result in EXACTLY the same denials. AVS No Match, which says if the info is not a 100% match it will "result in a denial." That makes sense. If it's not a match, it should get denied. Then AVS Partial Match says a invoking this filter will result in a denial if the address is a partial match. Ahhh, guys... if a transaction is a 'partial match' it by definition is also 'not 100% match'. What's the difference? No one in customer service can explain it because they are just reading the same non sensical info I have access to. They can't figure it out because the guys that wrote it didn't think it through.
It would be nice to know what these things actually do, if anything. What happens if the bank is not in the AVS system? What happens if there is a typo in the street name or number? Does it only check ZIP? how does it handle foreign cards? Not a word on such things. At one point we turned on the "Phone number" filter and it denied about 75% of ALL transactions! Useless. No explanation of what constitutes a problematic phone number.
Finally, why oh why don't those transaction denials show up in the 'Reason for Denials' panel? They are supposed to, of course. But my panels all say 'No Data.' Nice. It would be very useful to be able to see that when we have a particular filter turned on, and it denies, say, 10 transactions in a day, that we can relate specific transactions to the reason for denial. This way, we can know whether its helping us (denying transactions that should be denied) or hurting us (denying good customer transactions). For example, good repeat customers have called us to let us know that their card isn't going thru, and that alerts us to a problem. If it's an overly aggressive setting, then we can turn it off.
Instead, the whole system is botched from A to Z.
At one point, I saw a fraud protection upgrade where I'd pay a bit more per transaction for protection. The page just sat and spun. No idea whether it applied or not. But alas, nothing changed. Figures. Nothing here can be expected to work as advertised. It seems the system is irretrievable broken, so I'm very sorry to say I imagine we'll have to begin looking for another processor at some point.
Apart from that, we are very happy with Paypal. 😉 We will wait a bit longer to see if they can get it together.
