Stripe fraud alerts that catch chargebacks
before they happen

Stripe has a hard threshold: if your dispute rate exceeds 0.75%, your account gets flagged. Cross 1.5% and Stripe will shut you down with minimal warning. Most SaaS founders don't know this number exists until they've already breached it. A dispute rate creeps upward one chargeback at a time — it's invisible until it's critical. By the time you realize you're in danger, you're already close to losing your entire payment processing ability. The 0.75% threshold sounds conservative until you do the math: that's roughly one chargeback per 133 successful charges. For an SaaS company processing hundreds of transactions daily, that buffer evaporates fast.

Early Fraud Warnings from Stripe Radar are your first line of defense because they let you act before the chargeback ever lands. When Stripe flags a suspicious charge via EFW, you have a window of opportunity — typically days or even weeks before the customer notices and files a formal dispute. A preemptive refund doesn't count against your dispute rate at all; it's treated as a standard refund, not a chargeback. This is critical: if you wait for the chargeback, that event is locked into your rate calculation. If you refund first, you sidestep the rate hit entirely. The calculus is simple — losing the revenue on a $100 charge is painful, but it's not as painful as losing access to Stripe's entire infrastructure.

Disposable email detection adds a second layer: card testers and fraudsters often use throwaway email domains (mailinator, tempmail, 10minutemail) because they expect to burn the account quickly. When a payment succeeds from a disposable email, it's a fraud signal worth acting on immediately. Many SaaS companies ignore this signal because they assume it's just an engaged customer using privacy tools. In reality, disposable email signups convert to chargebacks and disputes at 5-10x the rate of real addresses. Catching these at payment time — not three months later during chargeback season — lets you refund, investigate, or block before the dispute ever filed.

Tips for keeping your dispute rate safe:

• →Act on Early Fraud Warnings within 24 hours. The longer you wait, the higher the chance the customer files a chargeback. One-click refund buttons let you move fast.
• →Track your dispute rate weekly from your MRRescue dashboard. Don't wait for Stripe to flag you. Know the number. If it trends upward, you have time to investigate root causes.
• →Adopt a disposable email strategy: either require phone verification, flag for manual review, or set a higher fraud threshold for disposable signups. Not all disposables are fraud, but the signal is strong.
• →Combine Early Fraud Warnings with backup card verification. Card testers will attempt charges multiple times. Verifying cards at signup with a $1 auth hold catches them before they accumulate EFWs against your account.