Canonical Labs

Stripe Radar Tune Up

Fewer disputes, and your good customers back.

Fraud creeping up on a setup you already run? We audit every rule and list you have, backtest a rebuilt Stripe Radar set on your own traffic, and win back the good customers your blocks turn away.

Talk to a Fraud Expert
Length
4 to 6 weeks
First result
Findings in week one
Where
Inside your Stripe
Engineering lift
None

Who it is for

  • Disputes are climbing, or a card network monitoring programme is getting close.
  • Your rules grew by patching, and nobody is sure what each one does.
  • Good customers are being declined, and you cannot see how many.

What is included

  • An audit of rules, lists, disputes and declines in Sigma
  • The good customers your blocks are turning away
  • New rules backtested on your own traffic, run as mirror rules first
  • Over-broad blocks relaxed to win approvals back
  • A tuned production configuration, a final report and a playbook

Inside an engagement. Five hours from a lost dispute to a live rule.

A real client engagement, shown step by step as it happened.

Ship · 3 of 3

The weeks after

  • 3,000+

    of devices from known fraud put on a blocklist

    Devices on the blocklist

  • 100+

    fraud payments blocked by it, with no false positives found on review

    Fraud blocked · 100+False positives found · 0

  • 50+

    accounts in five fraud rings, sent to the client to confirm

    Five rings

“That’s a slam dunk in my mind. The backtest tables back it up, so let’s turn it on.”

Fraud lead, trading-card app

−85%

fraud-coded disputes a week, five weeks after we started

Wk 1Wk 2Wk 3Wk 4Wk 5

How a Stripe Radar Tune Up runs.

Week by week, from the audit to a tuned configuration. Two calls a week early on, a written review every week, and a shared Slack channel the whole time.

  1. Week 0

    Discovery call and questionnaire

    Twenty minutes on what you are seeing. Then one page of questions: your dispute and fraud rates, what you block today, controls outside Stripe, and who decides.

    Scope and rule plan

  2. Day 1

    Access

    A developer seat on your Stripe account for our team, Sigma switched on, and a shared Slack channel. Nothing for your engineers to build.

    Seat, Sigma, Slack

  3. Week 1

    Audit and findings memo

    We read your rules, lists, disputes and declines in Sigma and Stripe Radar, and find where the losses come from and which good customers are being turned away.

    Findings memo

  4. Weeks 2 to 3

    Rule set v0 to v1

    A versioned rule set, each rule backtested on your traffic with what it catches and which good customers it touches. Mirror rules first, live only after your sign-off.

    Rule set and change log

  5. Weeks 2 to 4

    Lists, rings and over-broad blocks

    Block, allow and VIP lists rebuilt from what we see, rings found by shared cards, devices and IPs, and the blocks that catch more good customers than fraud relaxed.

    List strategy

  6. Week 3

    Dispute workshop

    A working session on bank reason codes, the evidence each one needs, and the rules that stop the same dispute coming back.

    Dispute playbook

  7. Week 4

    Tuned configuration and final report

    The tuned configuration in production, early-warning signals set up in Sigma, and a final report with every change and the cadence to keep it running.

    Final report and playbook

  8. After

    While disputes mature

    Disputes land 30 to 60 days after a payment, so we keep watching and check in. Stay on a retainer, or call us when something changes.

    Check-in or retainer

“You’re not aggressive. You’re not conservative. You’re logical, and every rule comes with the numbers behind it.”

Co-founder, trading-card app

Questions buyers ask.

No. A Tune Up starts from what you have, keeps what works, and fixes or removes the rest. Each change goes in the change log.

No. Everything we change lives in Stripe Radar, lists and Stripe settings. Sometimes a signal you already have (account age, trust level, KYC status) would make rules sharper; we write a one-page spec for passing it in the payment metadata, and it is your call whether to ship it.

A developer seat on your Stripe account, Sigma switched on, and a shared Slack channel. You can remove the seat at any time.

Often in the first days: on one launch, our first rules were live the same afternoon. Most engagements run four to six weeks, and disputes take 30 to 60 days to land, so we keep watching after.

Every rule is backtested first, with a list of the good customers it could touch. And we audit our own blocks: on one account we found good customers behind one of our own block rules, and relaxed it.

The configuration stays in your account and keeps working. You get the final report and the playbook, and we check in while disputes mature. A retainer is there if you want us to keep running it.

Our Stripe Radar services work inside Stripe. For other payment providers, ACH, identity checks or anything else, that is what Custom Solutions is for.

Each engagement is fixed in scope and priced on the engagement. We scope it with you on the first call.