Control traffic

Control traffic is part of our effort to continuously improve our risk management offering.

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, we evaluate if a transaction is legitimate or if there are signs that a transaction is fraudulent.

Transactions that go through a regular risk assessment get a risk score based on your risk profile and your standard or custom risk rule settings. If the risk score reaches 100, the payment is refused. Most of your transactions will go through a regular assessment.

Transactions that go through control traffic are authorised regardless of their risk score and fed into a separate dataset. Only a fraction of your total transactions will be part of control traffic.

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. Based on your analysis, you can make changes to your risk settings if needed.

Possible impact of control traffic

Only a small percentage (approximately one percent) of your total transactions is part of control traffic. Control traffic transactions are randomly selected. Similar to regular traffic, most transactions will be legitimate, but a number of transactions might be fraudulent.

Excluded from control traffic

The following transactions will not be considered for control traffic:

• Transactions with an amount of 2000 EUR or higher. On request, we can exclude transactions from control traffic that are below or above a different threshold.
• 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 either triggered at least one referral check, or the consistency checks Shopper IP originates from a high risk country or Issuing country with a risk score of 100 or more. For example:

  If the transaction triggers two or more referral checks:

  • When one referral or mentioned consistency checks scores 100, and another referral scores 40, the transaction is excluded.
  • When one referral scores 80, another referral scores 40, and one of the mentioned consistency checks scores 10, the transaction is not excluded.

  If the transaction triggers only one referral check:

  • When the referral scores 100, and the rest of the risk checks combined score 80, the transaction is excluded.
  • When the referral scores 80, and one of the mentioned consistency checks scores 100, the transaction is excluded.
  • When the referral scores 80, and the rest of the risk checks combined score 110, the transaction is not excluded.

Case management

By default, we don't send any control traffic transactions to case management. On request, we can turn on case management for control traffic, but a transaction will still only be sent to case management if it meets your case management settings. The transaction remains part of the control traffic data set.

It is not possible to turn on case management for all control traffic transactions.

How to find control traffic transactions

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.

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

1. Log in to your live Customer Area.
2. Go to Transactions > Payments.
3. Use the Filter button in the upper-right corner to filter payments.
4. Select Control Traffic, and then select Yes.
5. Select Apply all.

Check a single transaction

1. Log in to your live Customer Area.
2. Go to Transactions > Payments.
3. Select the Risk score for a payment from the payments overview to open the risk results page of that transaction.
4. Control traffic payments have this label: