A merchant received a medium-risk fraud analysis: the billing street address didn’t match the card’s registered address, but the ZIP/postal code did. They asked how to handle it and shared a screenshot of the fraud signals.
Interpretation: This can be legitimate due to address-format differences (e.g., “North” vs “N”, “Avenue” vs “Ave”). Medium-risk indicates potential risk, not a confirmed fraud.
Recommended actions:
Data point: Across analyzed stores, 0–10% of medium-risk orders resulted in chargebacks (most at 0%, some with occasional chargebacks).
Resources: A linked guide provides a process and outreach templates for medium/high-risk orders.
Status: No definitive resolution; proceed based on customer verification and risk tolerance.
Hi,
I recently received an order with a medium fraud analysis, I am not too sure how to interpret it because the it says “Billing street address doesn’t match credit card’s registered address” but then it also says “Billing address ZIP or postal code matches the credit card’s registered address”.
I have attached a full screenshot below, what should I do with an order like this?
To me that sounds legit, because sometimes credit cards format addresses differently, for example by 123 North 5th Avenue could also be 123 N 5th Ave.
In any case, you could reach out to the customer to let them know your fraud system triggered an alert, and ask for clarification.
In my experience most of the time medium risk orders are safe. In some data analysis I did on a bunch of stores, 0 - 10% of orders that were medium risk resulted in a chargeback (most stores it was 0%, some had an occasional chargeback).
If you talk to the customer and everything seems normal, that could give you the confidence to realize why it got flagged. If you talk to them and they seem avoidant or sketchy, that could be a reason to cancel the order and ask them to use a different payment method.
I wrote a guide for dealing with medium / high risk orders, and chargebacks, it also includes a template you can use to contact customers of risky orders. Feel free to check it out here: https://orderautomator.com/fraud-guide
Thank you so much for this. Super helpful for me.
