Saved a merchant $2,000 in “false positive” fraud orders last month

Wanted to share a case from last month that might be helpful for others here:

Shopify’s fraud filter flagged 13 orders as Medium Risk.
The challenge? No clear explanation — just a red flag that left the merchant stuck:
“Do I ship? Do I cancel? Am I about to lose money?”

In reality, all 13 were real customers with valid cards.
Without a way to dig deeper, those sales would have been lost.

Using the FraudGuard App, we were able to:

  • See both the positive trust signals and any negative ones (not visible in Shopify’s native filter)

  • Quickly verify each buyer with a last-4-digits card check

Result:

  • 13 orders safely fulfilled

  • $2,000 revenue recovered

  • 0 chargebacks

Has anyone else here run into “false positives” with Shopify’s fraud filter?
Curious to hear how you usually handle them.

Hi @Reuventr

Thanks for sharing this, it is a very common problem. We frequently see false positives from the fraud filter and have a quick manual review process for any “medium risk” order before making a decision.

Our process is to build a more complete picture of the customer. First, we confirm that the AVS and CVV checks passed within the order details in Shopify. Next, we use a free online tool to make sure the customer’s IP address location reasonably matches their shipping address.

Finally, we do a quick sanity check of their contact information and often a quick Google search for their name and city. Usually, finding a social media profile or other confirming evidence is enough to give us the confidence to safely fulfill the order. Looking at these few signals together is a quick and effective way to recover potentially lost sales.

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That’s very good advice! I really like how you’ve broken it down into a few simple checks that build trust quickly without losing the sale.

My goal with FraudGuard is to automate exactly that process