Proxy Detection is emerging as a critical component for online fraud detection applications. Fraudsters are becoming more sophisticated in bypassing Geolocation controls by using proxies to spoof their IP address and location.

For example, say a credit card fraudster located in Nigeria attempts to purchase goods online with a stolen credit card having a New York billing address. If the merchant uses Geolocation to block orders from Nigeria and other high risk countries, as well as to match up the billing location with the IP address location, the fraudster can bypass these checks by selecting a proxy located in New York. The IP address location appears to be legitimate since it is in the same city as the billing address. A proxy check would be needed to flag this order.

Besides payment fraud, proxy checking is needed for any application where the IP Geolocation is used to authenticate online transactions, to protect from IP address spoofing.

To learn more, read about IP Authentication with IP Geolocation and Proxy Detection.

For detecting online fraud or abuse, we recommend using the minFraud or proxy detection web service over GeoIP, since the minFraud and proxy detection services report both anonymous and open proxies, while GeoIP only contains anonymous proxies.

Proxy Detection queries
This service returns whether an IP address is a known anonymous or open proxy server.
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