We take payments fraud very serious.
As the world becomes more connected, it becomes easier and easier for fraudsters to attempt fraudulent transactions. In addition to our best-in-class security practices, we also strive to keep our clients as safe as possible from fraudulent transactions and potential chargebacks.
Ultimately, the card-issuing bank is the entity that should be recognizing transactions as uncharacteristic of the card-holder and/or know when a card has been stolen and stop approving transactions. Unfortunately, this doesn't always happen. That's where our fraud-prevention and fighting practices come in.
While we can't give away all of our secrets, here are a few of our practices:
Tracking (and risk-grading) of over 100 data-points, including previous activity on that card across our payment network. This includes IP addresses, device fingerprints, event information, location proximity, and much much more.
State of the art Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning systems to rank the risk level of every transaction in real-time. This practice alone prevents THOUSANDS of potentially fraudulent transactions every year!
Human (manual) reviews of large subsets of "risky" transactions. Yep - we also use good ol' "Human Intelligence" (HI?) to review transactions that meet certain characteristics and to make manual judgement calls on risk levels.
Connection to several major databases of real-time fraud reports. There's an 89% chance any card used on our system has been seen throughout the network of data we access, and we use this data to stop transactions from cards with behavior already deemed (or reported) as fraudulent.
What happens if I receive a "Fraud Alert" email?
If you're using the Passage Ticketing Network to sell tickets to your event, it's possible that you'll receive a "Fraud Alert" email. This occurs when a transaction was initially allowed through (approved by the card-issuing bank and passed our initial fraud risk analysis), but later deemed to be fraudulent. This could be from new information (such as transactions from cards later reported as stolen) or details our manual analysis caught that our initial automated analysis didn't catch. Either way, this is helping to keep fraudsters away from your event and prevent chargebacks from being filed against you!
When we later deem a transaction that was previously approved as likely fraudulent we do a few things:
We void the transaction and refund the money to the card used. The tickets are also deactivated and will not scan in properly.
We email you (the event organizer) to let you know (including details of the transaction).
We email the purchaser to let them know their transaction was deemed likely fraudulent, reversed, and the tickets will no longer work. we do this just in case it actually was a legitimate transaction. We've had instances of people visiting a US event from China and actually buying their tickets in China... that looks a lot like fraud, but actually wasn't (that customer was allowed by the event to purchase at-the-door).
Please note: The first thing we do is to kill the tickets! These tickets won't scan in. If you're scanning tickets and you come across some that refuse to scan in, this is very likely the reason! Don't let those customers in without making them pay at-the-door. If paying with a card, we'd suggest checking their ID to make sure their name matches that on the card as well.
Any transaction we've reversed as likely fraudulent after 10/2/2018 will also be denoted with "fraudulent" in your reporting.
Of course, if you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to our support team at +1.855.688.7277 (option 1) or hit the chat button in the bottom right of this page.