Control traffic is part of our effort to continuously improve our risk management offering. Using control traffic is an industry standard practice. We want to be as transparent as possible, so you'll be able to see all the transactions that were part of control traffic.
Having a control traffic dataset will help you evaluate the performance of your current risk profile setup and strategy by helping you to:
- Identify false positives: good transactions rejected by your risk profile.
- Confirm true positives: bad transactions correctly rejected by your risk profile.
How control traffic works
When processing transactions, the risk profile evaluates whether a transaction is legitimate or if there are signs that it is fraudulent. Most transactions will go through this regular risk assessment.
A very small percentage of all transactions is randomly selected to be part of control traffic. Control traffic transactions are settled regardless of their risk evaluation. The transactions are fed into a separate control traffic dataset.
By analyzing control traffic transactions, you can optimize your risk settings. Looking at the risk rules that triggered, you can identify if a transaction is a false positive, and would have been blocked by your risk profile for no good reason. You can also confirm true positives. If you see a dispute on a control traffic transaction that would have been blocked by risk, it means that your risk profile is correctly identifying fraud. Based on your analysis, you can make changes to your risk settings if needed.
Possible impact of control traffic
Similar to regular traffic, most transactions will be legitimate, but a number of transactions might be fraudulent. Only a small number of transactions are selected for control traffic and some transactions are always excluded from control traffic.
Excluded from control traffic
The following transactions will not be considered for control traffic:
- Transactions with an amount of EUR 2000 or higher.
- Transactions that have been refused several times in a row.
- Transactions made with a payment method that you have not included in the risk evaluation.
- Transactions that have properties included in your block or trust lists.
- Transactions that originate from a high risk country or region.
Case management
Having a control traffic dataset is key in helping you to evaluate your risk profile performance. This is why we exclude control traffic transactions from manual review.
If you have enabled premium features, and a control traffic transaction meets your case management settings, it is not possible to send the transaction to case management.
How to find control traffic transactions
You can search for all control traffic transactions, or check if a single transaction was part of control traffic.
Search for all control traffic transactions
- Log in to your live Customer Area.
- Go to Transactions > Payments.
- Use the Filter button in the upper-right corner to filter payments.
- Select Control Traffic, and then select Yes.
- Select Apply all.
Check a single transaction
- Log in to your live Customer Area.
- Go to Transactions > Payments.
- Select the Risk score for a payment from the payments overview to open the risk results page of that transaction.
- Control traffic payments have this label:
