Fraud Screen

Fraud Screen scores every order against the warning signs of stolen-card fraud and, when an order scores high enough, moves it to a review status you choose, with a note in its history saying why. It runs after the order is placed and the payment has gone through, so a shopper never sees an error, a false alarm delays an order instead of losing a sale, and declined attempts are never screened.

It was written after a live store took a month of stolen-card orders. The attacker used a new email address and a new IP address on every order, so blocking those was useless, but reused the same phone numbers, went after one easily resold product, and always billed to one state while shipping to another. Fraud Screen scores exactly those signs: watched phone numbers, email patterns you supply, billing and delivery in different states or countries, watched products, and the same phone number or delivery address turning up for a different customer. Your returning customers never count against themselves.

It never blocks a shopper, never shows a message and never emails the customer; the only visible effect is the order’s status and a comment in its history. It installs switched off. Turn on its log first and it records what it would have held, so you can tune the rules against real orders before it holds anything. On the store it was written for, a dry run over 3,300 orders caught all eight known fraudulent orders and held nothing else, once tuned. It doesn’t change how you take payment, and no core or template file is changed.

Zen Cart 2.1.0 through 3.0.0, PHP 7.4 through 8.5, encapsulated plugin. GPL-2.0.

Questions? Ask in the Fraud Screen support thread on the Zen Cart forum.