Developers

Evaluate a Transaction

Evaluating a transaction consists of setting up device tracking on your website, creating an object that contains the details of the transaction, and then submitting the transaction to the minFraud service for evaluation.

Implementation

MaxMind offers and highly recommends using official client libraries to access our minFraud services. If you cannot or do not wish to use our client libraries, please review our minFraud API Documentation page for details on our JSON API.

1. Add device tracking to your website

The Device Tracking Add-On runs on a visiting device so that the minFraud service can assign a device ID and begin collecting fingerprint information. This helps detect fraudsters if they change or enable proxies while browsing your website.

Note that, in order to be effective, the Device Tracking Add-on must, at a minimum, be included on the page where the IP address is captured for a minFraud query.

Place the following code in the footer of the HTML webpage and replace ACCOUNT_ID with your MaxMind account ID:

2. Install the minFraud client library

We have a collection of officially supported libraries for you to interact with the minFraud API:

3. Create a minFraud client object

To interact with our API, you need to create a new client object. For this you will need your MaxMind account ID and license key:

4. Create a transaction object

The transaction object represents a customer's transaction that you are sending to the minFraud service for evaluation. There are no mandatory fields, but including more information about the transaction improves the accuracy of the transaction's evaluation. The following examples use the recommended minimum amount of information you should submit:

5. Submit the transaction object for evaluation

Our client libraries provide a distinct method for each minFraud service. Use the appropriate method to submit the transaction object to the minFraud Score, Insights, or Factors service.

Validation and error handling

By default, our client libaries will throw an exception if any of the transaction object's values are invalid. The exception is thrown when the object is constructed; the python library will raise an error when the minFraud service method is called.

If the minFraud request fails, our client libraires will throw an exception, raise an error (python), or reject the promise (node).

For more information on errors and exceptions, including their types and descriptions, go to the specific library's documentation page.

This page was last updated on June 6, 2023.