Fraud Prevention Vendors
This page sorts fraud tools by type, so you can tell which kind to buy first. Looking for named vendors compared side by side, with prices or chargeback dispute services?
- Start with your processor's tools. On standard Stripe pricing, Radar Lite comes at no additional charge. Shopify shows fraud indicators on the Basic plan or higher, and once you turn on Square's Risk Manager for online payments, its default rules trigger risk alerts. Adyen publishes no price for RevenueProtect, so confirm it in your contract. Add paid help for a measured fraud or workload gap, after comparing avoided loss with fees and blocked good orders
- No full-stack fraud platform publishes a price. Sift, Sardine, Signifyd, Forter, Riskified and Kount were all checked on 2 August 2026. Not one does. The nearest public anchor is SEON, a tier down in enrichment: $699/month for 2,500 checks, about 28 cents a check. Quote it back when a sales rep names a number
- Two ownership corrections. Midigator no longer exists. Equifax bought it and folded it into Kount, and Kount itself now redirects to Equifax. Accertify is no longer an American Express company
- Guarantee vendors get paid to decline your borderline orders. Before you celebrate the liability shift, ask for their decline rate on your traffic
- Run shadow mode before you sign anything. Any vendor worth buying will let you test without going live
Your processor's tools are the place to start. When a specific problem persists, the sections below help you choose the category to test. Revenue alone doesn't decide what to buy.
This page covers card-not-present and online fraud tools only. Point-of-sale fraud is a different stack: EMV terminals, P2PE, physical card security. None of it is here. After POS security? Wrong page.
Find Your Row, Ignore the Rest
| Volume | What to Do | What to Ignore |
|---|---|---|
| Under $100K/year | Start with current processor tools and identify missed fraud by cause and dollars. | Tools with no measured gap to address |
| $100K-$1M/year | Check fraud and ACH returns separately; test a tool only for a named gap. | Buying on volume alone |
| $1M-$10M/year | Evaluate one tool at a time against current coverage, cost and customer impact. | Adding layers before the first one is tested |
| Over $10M/year | Compare staffing, integration work and loss exposure before adding a platform or orchestration. | Buying everything at once |
Treat the volume rows as planning examples, not purchase requirements. Check the cause of your losses and what current controls miss before buying.
Processor-Native Tools
When This Matters
When you need fraud protection but can't take on another vendor.
Who Should Use This
Merchants whose current tools cover their losses and workload. Anyone who wants fewer contracts. Check whether the available settings address your actual fraud patterns.
| Vendor | Good fit if... | Tradeoff |
|---|---|---|
| Stripe Radar | You are already on Stripe and want one-click fraud protection. Decent ML, good defaults for most e-commerce. Radar Lite is included with Stripe Payments at no extra charge. | Only works on Stripe. Custom rules and review queues need a paid tier (Standard, Plus or Pro). If you leave Stripe, you start over. |
| Adyen Risk | You are on Adyen and want integrated protection. Strong in enterprise and international. | Adyen-only. Less transparent than standalone tools. |
| Braintree / PayPal | You are on Braintree or want PayPal buyer protection dynamics. | PayPal ecosystem lock-in. Less configurable than Stripe Radar. |
| Shopify Fraud Analysis | You are on Shopify and want integrated order analysis. | Check missed fraud and available controls; sales volume alone doesn't establish that you need another tool. |
Before you look outside, find out what your processor already gives you. Book 30 minutes with your account rep. Ask two things. "What fraud tools are in my current plan?" And "what would upgrading cost me?" That call often saves six months of vendor evaluation.
Before adding a vendor: use the processor tools you already have. Revisit when you can name and measure a problem they miss.
Full-Stack Fraud Platforms
When This Matters
When your processor's tools miss too much. When you need real control over the rules. Or when you want a chargeback guarantee.
Who Should Use This
Merchants above $1M with someone touching fraud at least a few hours a week. Companies with enough volume that a per-transaction fee still pays for itself.
| Vendor | Good fit if... | Tradeoff |
|---|---|---|
| Sardine | You need device fingerprinting, behavioral analytics, fraud rules, and compliance in one SDK. Best for fintech, crypto, BNPL, platforms that hold balances or issue cards. | Overkill for simple DTC e-commerce under $1M. Fintech-native, less e-commerce playbook out of the box. |
| Signifyd | You want a guarantee model where they reimburse fraud they approve. E-commerce focus, easy integration. | They make money by being conservative. They will decline borderline transactions you might have approved. Calculate false positive cost before celebrating the guarantee. |
| Forter | Similar guarantee model to Signifyd. High automation, less manual review. | Less customizable. Guarantee model means conservative decisions. |
| Riskified | Guarantee model with strong e-commerce vertical expertise. | Limited to certain verticals. Same guarantee tradeoff: they profit from declining edge cases. |
| Sift | Real-time ML, strong account protection and ATO prevention. More customizable than guarantee vendors. | Can be expensive at scale. No guarantee model means you own the losses. |
| Kount (Equifax) | Configurable rules plus ML. Good for teams that want control over decisioning logic. | Steeper learning curve. Requires more hands-on management than guarantee vendors. Kount is also mid-absorption: kount.com now redirects to equifax.com/business/identity-fraud/, so confirm the current product name and roadmap before you sign. |
Sift, Sardine, Signifyd, Forter, Riskified and Kount were all checked against their own sites on 2 August 2026. Not one publishes a rate card. Signifyd goes furthest. It publishes the model without the numbers: "a percentage of the order total when an order is approved," and "no charge when an order is declined due to fraud." Riskified's pricing page is a contact form. Forter's is a request for a sales call. Sardine's returns a 404.
That's normal for this market. It also means no cost comparison until you've sat through three sales calls. The nearest published number in fraud tooling is SEON, at $699/month for 2,500 checks. SEON is a tier down from these platforms. Bring it up anyway. Ask a vendor charging several times more per screen to justify the gap. Silence is an answer.
Pull your last 90 days of chargebacks. Tag the ones your processor already flags high-risk. Ask any vendor for a 30-day shadow mode pilot. Compare their "would-block" list against your real fraud and your real customers. If the false positives cost more than the catches save, don't buy.
Guarantee model warning: Signifyd, Forter and Riskified reimburse you for fraud they approve. Sounds great. They also make money by being conservative. So they'll decline borderline orders you'd have taken. Before you celebrate the guarantee, work out what their false positives cost you. For illustration, compare 0.5% fraud with 2% of good orders blocked against 0.8% fraud with 0.3% of good orders blocked. Which costs more depends on order values, margins, fees and guarantee coverage. Use your own inputs.
Before buying a platform: test the gap in processor coverage and compare the avoided loss with fees, customer impact and review time.
Identity Verification / KYC
When This Matters
When you need to know a person is who they say. Account opening. High-value orders. A regulatory obligation. Or something suspicious tripping a flag. See KYC & KYB for Fraud Prevention to size the verification to the risk.
Who Should Use This
Fintechs. Marketplaces onboarding sellers. Anyone with a KYC obligation. Platforms where account-level fraud hurts more than transaction-level fraud.
Passive verification (no customer friction, $0.02-0.50/check):
| Vendor | Good fit if... | Tradeoff |
|---|---|---|
| Socure | You want ML-based identity verification without requiring document uploads. Strongest synthetic fraud detection in the US market. | Premium pricing. US-centric - international coverage is thinner. |
| SentiLink | You need synthetic identity scoring specifically. Does one thing extremely well. Often layered with other vendors. | US only. Synthetic fraud only - not a full IDV solution. |
| Prove | You want zero-friction phone-centric verification. Strong carrier data signals (SIM tenure, port history). | Phone-focused. Less comprehensive than document-based options. |
| Ekata (Mastercard) | You want lightweight identity enrichment (phone, email, address, IP). Quick integration, simple API. | Not a full IDV solution. Best as a supplementary signal. |
| Trulioo | You need global coverage (195+ countries) for cross-border identity verification. Combined KYC + KYB + AML. | Less depth on US synthetic fraud than Socure. |
| Plaid Identity | You already use Plaid for bank connectivity and want the strongest identity signal available. Bank data is hard to fake. | ~$500/month platform baseline + per-check. High friction (bank-linking flow). Not for simple e-commerce. |
Documentary verification (ID scan + selfie + liveness, $0.80-5.00/check):
| Vendor | Good fit if... | Tradeoff |
|---|---|---|
| Stripe Identity | You're already on Stripe and want documentary verification with zero new vendor setup. $1.50 per verification (document plus selfie), first 50 free. | Stripe-only. Less configurable than standalone IDV vendors. At $1.50 it sits mid-range against Veriff's published $0.80-1.89, so pick it for the zero-integration path, not for the price. |
| Veriff | You want transparent, published pricing ($0.80-1.89/check). Self-serve signup. Strong in Europe. | Less US-centric than alternatives. |
| Sumsub | You want all-in-one KYC + KYB + AML. 2025 Gartner Leader. No-code verification links available. | Broader platform means more to configure if you only need basic document checks. |
| Persona | Developer-friendly, flexible multi-step workflows, good for custom verification flows. Also does KYB. 2025 Gartner Leader. | Higher starting cost than Veriff. |
| Jumio | You need global document coverage (5,000+ document types). Strong in regulated industries. | Enterprise pricing. No self-serve. |
| Onfido (Entrust) | Strong in fintech, good user experience for document capture. Acquired by Entrust in 2024. | Regional coverage varies. Check your specific markets. |
| Incode | Speed matters (1.5s average verification) or you need strong Latin America coverage. 2025 Gartner Leader. | Enterprise-focused. No self-serve. |
| Mitek | Enterprise with strong biometric needs. MiPass 4D combines face + voice + liveness. Datos Insights leader (Jan 2026). | Enterprise-only. No self-serve. |
| Au10tix | You need fast (4-8s) automated verification and consortium-based coordinated attack detection. | Enterprise-focused. |
| iProov | You need the strongest deepfake and injection attack detection available. Liveness specialist. | Biometrics only - does not do document verification. Pair with a doc vendor. |
Before you buy IDV, measure your signup abandonment rate today. Then run the vendor on one segment for two weeks. If abandonment climbs more than fraud falls, the friction isn't worth it.
Before buying IDV: check applicable requirements, confirmed identity misuse and the cost of rejecting legitimate applicants. Use the least intrusive checks that address those needs.
Data Enrichment APIs
When This Matters
When you want to add context to transactions without a client-side SDK. These APIs look up IP, email, phone and identity signals server-side. That feeds your fraud rules.
Who Should Use This
Merchants above $500K who want more signals than the processor gives them. Without the cost of a full-stack platform. See Data Enrichment for Fraud Rules for the full guide.
Already running a full-stack platform? Sift, Sardine, Signifyd, Forter and Kount all pull IP, email and phone signals internally. Don't double-buy. Ask your vendor what it ingests before you add a standalone API.
| Vendor | Good fit if... | Tradeoff |
|---|---|---|
| MaxMind | You want the industry-standard IP intelligence. GeoLite2 is free. minFraud adds email, phone, and device scoring. | IP-focused. Email and phone signals are thinner than specialists. |
| IPQS | You want IP + email + phone in one API. Free plan for testing, paid from $99/month. | Gives you signals, not decisions. You write the rules yourself. |
| SEON | You want deep social media lookups (90+ platforms) on email addresses, or you just want to see a price before a sales call. Starter is $699/month for 2,500 fraud checks, 10 users and 50 rules; Premium is custom (seon.io/pricing, checked 2026-08-02). | About 28 cents a check at the Starter allowance. Evaluate whether a full-stack platform gives you more for similar money - though you'll have to sit through a sales call to find out, because none of them publish rates. |
Pull your last 30 chargebacks. Look up each IP with MaxMind GeoLite2. It's free. Then run the email and phone on the IPQS free plan. Compare those signals with legitimate orders from the same segment. Price the fraud a rule could catch against blocked good orders and the enrichment fee.
Under $500K: MaxMind GeoLite2 is free and takes 15 minutes to wire up. Start there.
Risk Orchestration Platforms
When This Matters
When you're pulling 3+ fraud signals from different sources. And you need one decision out of them. When keeping the integrations alive has quietly become somebody's job.
Who Should Use This
Companies above $10M with several fraud vendors already running. Teams with fraud engineers. Businesses where the decisioning logic is the product, not an afterthought.
| Vendor | Good fit if... | Tradeoff |
|---|---|---|
| Alloy | You need identity, fraud and compliance signals running through one workflow. Strong in fintech onboarding. | These are meta-tools and plumbing, not magic fraud brains. If you don't know which signals you need, orchestration won't help. |
| Unit21 | You want case management plus orchestration. Good for teams doing manual review at scale. | Same caveat: orchestration without strategy is just expensive plumbing. |
Draw the fraud flow first. Orchestration earns its place when it saves more integration work or prevents more decision errors than it costs.
Draw your current fraud flow. Record integration maintenance hours, failure costs and duplicated decisions. Compare those with the full orchestration quote and migration work; the number of boxes alone won't answer it.
Before adding orchestration: get the current tools working and measure their maintenance burden. A sales cutoff isn't a substitute for that comparison.
Bank Account / ACH Verification
When This Matters
When you take ACH and the returns are eating your margin. R01 is insufficient funds, R10 is unauthorized.
Who Should Use This
Any business with meaningful ACH volume. Subscription businesses with recurring debits. Platforms that pay out to bank accounts (gig economy, marketplaces).
| Vendor | Good fit if... | Tradeoff |
|---|---|---|
| Plaid | You want the broadest bank coverage and the most features (Auth, Identity, Balance, Signal). Default choice for most. | Some customers resist linking their bank. Pricing can add up at volume. |
| Stripe Financial Connections | You are already on Stripe and want tight integration. | Stripe-only. Less coverage than Plaid for some banks. |
| Finicity (Mastercard) | You want an alternative to Plaid with enterprise features. | Smaller network than Plaid. |
| MX | Strong coverage in credit unions. Good if your customer base skews toward CUs. | Less coverage in large banks than Plaid. |
An illustrative test might check first debits over $500. Choose the amount from your own return losses, and plan the sample and outcome window. Compare equivalent eligible traffic and include abandonment and fees. A live pilot needs the risk owner, loss cap and rollback; don't remove existing checks to create a control.
Choose ACH verification from the risk it addresses. Micro-deposits can establish access to an account; they don't establish funds availability or eliminate unauthorized returns. Compare each tool with the return problem you actually have.
Chargeback and Dispute Management
When This Matters
When dispute volume is drowning your team. Or your ratio is climbing toward a network program.
Set an internal warning before your processor's written limit. Visa enforces through VAMP now, Mastercard through ECM. Read Monitoring Thresholds before you go vendor shopping.
Who Should Use This
Merchants with steady chargeback volume who want to kill disputes before the network sees them. Or who need representment help at scale.
| Vendor | Good fit if... | Tradeoff |
|---|---|---|
| Ethoca (Mastercard) | You want pre-dispute alerts. When a cardholder complains to their bank, you get notified before it becomes a chargeback. Refund quickly and it never hits your ratio. | A refund costs you the sale. A dispute costs you the sale plus fees plus program risk. Alerts are a tax on bad customer experience, not a fix. |
| Verifi (Visa) | Same pre-dispute alert concept, plus CE 3.0 integration for compelling evidence automation. | Same tradeoff as Ethoca. Fix root causes, not just symptoms. |
| Chargebacks911 | Full-service dispute management. They handle representment for you. Often includes Ethoca and Verifi access bundled. | You are outsourcing expertise you might want in-house. |
| Chargeflow | Automated representment, Shopify-first, and one of the few vendors here that publishes its pricing: 25% of what it recovers, no monthly fee. | Pay-for-success means you only pay on wins, but you're also handing over the evidence decisions. |
| Gone. Acquired by Equifax in 2022 and folded into Kount. midigator.com now 301-redirects to kount.com, which itself redirects to equifax.com/business/identity-fraud/ (checked 2026-08-02). | If a broker pitches you Midigator, they're selling a brand that no longer exists. Ask what Equifax entity the contract sits with. |
Bundling note: Chargebacks911, Chargeback Gurus and similar vendors usually bundle Ethoca and Verifi access. One integration, and sometimes cheaper than going direct on their volume pricing. Neither Ethoca nor Verifi publishes a per-alert rate. So compare two reseller quotes instead of a published number. See what chargeback alerts cost.
From the issuer side: a pre-dispute alert is a customer complaint that hasn't become a chargeback yet. Refund fast and it never reaches the network as a dispute. A refund costs you the sale. A dispute costs you the sale plus fees plus program risk. Alerts buy you the right to pick the cheaper loss.
Before you buy alerts, pull your last 50 chargebacks. How many would you have refunded with 24 hours' notice? Ask the provider which ones its service could have covered. Compare those avoided costs with alert fees and extra refunds. Keep working on the cause too.
Bot and Abuse Mitigation
When This Matters
When you're taking automated attacks. Card testing, credential stuffing, fake accounts, promo abuse at scale.
Who Should Use This
Platforms with public signup or checkout flows that bots have found. E-commerce running flash sales or limited inventory. Anyone watching velocity patterns that don't look human.
| Vendor | Good fit if... | Tradeoff |
|---|---|---|
| Arkose Labs | You want to make bot attacks economically unviable. Strong against credential stuffing and fake accounts. | Adds friction. Not every business needs this level of protection. |
| DataDome | Alternative in bot mitigation. Real-time detection. | Similar tradeoffs to Arkose. |
| HUMAN | Another player in the bot detection space. | Evaluate based on your specific attack patterns. |
Before buying bot mitigation, examine a representative period of server logs. Price failed authorizations, infrastructure, fraud and legitimate customers lost to challenges. Test whether existing rate limits contain the attacks, then compare the remaining loss with a mitigation quote.
If you aren't seeing obvious bot attacks: you don't need dedicated bot mitigation. Start with rate limiting and CAPTCHA.
Build vs. Buy
Building your own models needs stable data, confirmed outcomes and staff to maintain them. Compare that work with buying a tool for the same measured gap. Revenue alone doesn't establish readiness.
When to Buy
- Speed to market matters more than tuning
- You don't have ML or data science people
- You want consortium data, because vendors see fraud across many merchants
- Your fraud patterns are ordinary for your vertical
When to Build
- You have unique data no vendor can see
- You have ML engineers who understand fraud
- Your volume economics make per-transaction fees painful
- You want to own the decisioning logic as a competitive advantage
Hybrid Approach (Most Common Above $10M)
- Buy: Device fingerprinting, identity verification, consortium signals
- Build: Core decisioning logic, model tuning, custom rules
- Integrate: Multiple vendor signals into your own scoring
What This Page Does Not Cover
Card-present / POS fraud tools: a different category with different vendors. EMV terminal security, P2PE encryption, physical card fraud.
Issuer-side tools: FICO Falcon, Mastercard Decision Intelligence, Visa Advanced Authorization. Those are for issuers making authorization decisions, not merchants.
Pure AML / compliance tools: transaction monitoring for money laundering, SAR filing and sanctions screening are compliance tools, not fraud tools. There's overlap at Sardine and Alloy, but dedicated AML platforms are out of scope here.
Before You Buy Anything
- Categorize your fraud. Pull 100 chargebacks and tag them: true fraud, friendly fraud, service issues. If most are friendly fraud, you've got a customer experience problem, not a fraud tool problem.
- Work out what fraud actually costs you. Count disputes, fees, staff time and false positives. A tool can catch more fraud and still lose you money. Compare the loss savings with blocked good orders, fees and staff time on the same segment.
- Run shadow mode. Any vendor worth buying will let you test without going live. If they won't, walk away.
- Set kill criteria before you start. Decide what a bad outcome looks like before you see any results. Otherwise you'll rationalize whatever happens.
- Talk to your processor first. Thirty minutes with Stripe, Adyen or your acquirer can save you six months of vendor evaluation. Ask what's already in your plan.
If your provider changed screening prices, reconcile the billed events and current controls before paying for more.
Do next
- Processor-Native Tools - Start here if under $1M volume
- Fraud Metrics - Measuring vendor performance
- Chargeback Alerts - Alert services
Look up
- Dispute Monitoring Thresholds - Where the networks actually start fining you
Deeper
- Processor Management - Processor-native tools
- Rules vs. ML - Understanding vendor technology
- Chargeback Management - Ethoca, Verifi, and dispute tools
- Device Fingerprinting - Device intelligence
- Identity Verification - IDV tools
- Risk Scoring - Scoring systems
- 3D Secure - Authentication vendors