Report a transaction
Reporting transactions as chargebacks, suspected fraud, spam/abuse, and/or false positive (not fraud) to MaxMind helps us detect about 10-50% more fraud and reduce false positives for you.
You can report a transaction manually through the account portal’s web form or your minFraud Transactions page. This guide will show you how to programmatically report a transaction using our official client libraries.
Implementation
MaxMind offers and highly recommends using official client libraries to access the Report Transaction API. If you cannot or do not wish to use our client libraries, please review our minFraud Report Transaction API Documentation for details on our JSON API.
1. Install the minFraud client library
We have a collection of officially supported libraries for you to interact with the minFraud API:
2. Create and submit a transaction report object
A transaction report only needs two fields, a transaction identifier, which can
be the ip_address, the maxmind_id, the minfraud_id, or the
transaction_id, and a tag. A tag can be one of the following values:
| Tag | Description |
|---|---|
| Chargeback | Used to associate a chargeback with a transaction |
| Clear | Used to clear a previous transaction report tag if new information indicates the initial classification was incorrect |
| Not fraud | Used to report a transaction that was later identified as a false positive |
| Spam or Abuse | Used to report a transaction that was linked to spam or abuse |
| Suspected fraud | Used to report a high risk transaction where fraud has not yet been confirmed |
We highly encourage you to include the MaxMind ID or minFraud ID that identifies the minFraud Standard/Premium request or minFraud Score/Insights/Factors request respectively. Alternatively, you can send us the transaction ID you originally passed to the minFraud service.
The transaction report object may optionally contain a chargeback code and notes about the transaction you would like to share with MaxMind. MaxMind manually reviews many reported transactions, so any additional details you provide to help us understand context are extremely helpful.
Validation and error handling
By default, our client libraries will throw an exception if any of the transaction report 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 report transaction request fails, our client libraries 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.
API Documentation
The HTTP API requires you to pass a set of parameters as JSON via an HTTP POST.
The URI for this service is
https://minfraud.maxmind.com/minfraud/v2.0/transactions/report.
The minfraud.maxmind.com hostname automatically picks the data center
geographically closest to you.
For a machine-readable description of the Report Transaction request fields and responses, see the minFraud OpenAPI specification (raw file).
Authorization and Security
The HTTP Authorization header is required for authorization. The username is your MaxMind account ID. The password is your MaxMind license key.
We use
basic HTTP authentication.
The APIs which require authentication are only available via HTTPS. Always use
HTTPS, so that your credentials are never transmitted unencrypted. If you
attempt to access this service via HTTP, you will receive a 403 Forbidden HTTP
response.
We require TLS 1.2 or greater for all requests to our servers to keep your data secure.
Request Headers
The Content-Type header should always be application/json.
Request Body
The minFraud API accepts input as JSON in the body of an HTTP POST. The JSON document should consist of a single object. That object may contain the following keys:
| Data field name | Type | Data field description |
|---|---|---|
| ip_address | string | Conditionally required.1 The IP address of the customer placing the order. This should be passed as a string like “44.55.66.77” or “2001:db8::2:1”. |
| tag | string | Required. A string indicating the likelihood that a transaction may be fraudulent, or clear to retract a previous report. Possible values: not_fraud, suspected_fraud, spam_or_abuse, chargeback, or clear. |
| chargeback_code | string | Optional. A string which is provided by your payment processor indicating the reason for the chargeback. It must not contain a NUL character. |
| maxmind_id | string (8) | Conditionally required.1 A unique eight character string identifying a minFraud Standard or Premium request. These IDs are returned in the maxmindID field of a response for a successful minFraud request. |
| minfraud_id | string (36) | Conditionally required.1 A UUID that identifies a minFraud Score, minFraud Insights, or minFraud Factors request. This ID is returned at /id in the response. |
| notes | string | Optional. Your notes on the fraud tag associated with the transaction. We manually review many reported transactions to improve our scoring for you, so any additional details to help us understand context are helpful. Must be 1000 Unicode characters or fewer. It must not contain a NUL character. |
| transaction_id | string | Conditionally required.1 The transaction ID you originally passed to minFraud. It must not contain a NUL character. |
Response
HTTP status codes are used to relay success and error messages. A successful POST will return a 204 (No Content) status code.
When the server returns an error (4xx or 5xx), the response may include a JSON
document in the body. This document is a single object with the keys code and
error. The code field is a static error code for machine use. The value of
any given code will never change, though codes can be added or removed. The
error field is a human-readable description of the error and may change at any
time.
Not all errors include a JSON body. Some 4xx errors, such as a 403 for a
plain HTTP request, and many 5xx errors, which typically happen outside of our
web service request handling code, do not include one. You should check the
Content-Type of an error response before attempting to decode the body as
JSON.
In addition to the errors documented below, client code should also be prepared to handle any valid HTTP 4xx or 5xx status code.
| Error Code | HTTP Status | Description |
|---|---|---|
| JSON_INVALID | 400 Bad Request | The request body is not a valid JSON object. |
| MAXMIND_ID_INVALID | 400 Bad Request | You have supplied an invalid maxmind_id. This field is case sensitive. Check your maxmind_id to ensure that it is 8 characters in length and made up only of digits and upper case letters. This value must come from the successful response to a previous minFraud request. |
| MINFRAUD_ID_INVALID | 400 Bad Request | You have supplied an invalid minfraud_id. Check your minfraud_id to ensure that it is a valid UUID as returned in the minFraud Score, minFraud Insights, or minFraud Factors response. |
| PARAMETER_UNKNOWN | 400 Bad Request | You have supplied an unknown parameter. Check the keys in your JSON data to ensure that you have not misspelled any of the field names or passed a field name which is not listed in the available input fields. |
| NOTES_INVALID | 400 Bad Request | Your request includes a notes field that exceeds 1000 Unicode characters or contains a NUL character. |
| TAG_REQUIRED | 400 Bad Request | Your request does not include a tag field. |
| TAG_INVALID | 400 Bad Request | Your request includes an invalid tag field. |
| TRANSACTION_ID_REQUIRED | 400 Bad Request | Your request must include one of the following fields: ip_address, maxmind_id, minfraud_id, or transaction_id. |
| IP_ADDRESS_INVALID | 400 Bad Request | You have not supplied a valid IPv4 or IPv6 address. |
| IP_ADDRESS_RESERVED | 400 Bad Request | You have supplied an IP address which belongs to a reserved or private range. |
<FIELD>_INVALID | 400 Bad Request | A request field has the wrong JSON type. This applies to every request field, including fields with their own row, such as tag and notes. <FIELD> is the field name in upper case, for example TRANSACTION_ID_INVALID or CHARGEBACK_CODE_INVALID. TRANSACTION_ID_INVALID and CHARGEBACK_CODE_INVALID are also returned when the field contains a NUL character. |
| AUTHORIZATION_INVALID | 401 Unauthorized | You have supplied an invalid MaxMind account ID and/or license key in the Authorization header. |
| LICENSE_KEY_REQUIRED | 401 Unauthorized | You have not supplied a MaxMind license key in the Authorization header. |
| ACCOUNT_ID_REQUIRED | 401 Unauthorized | You have not supplied a MaxMind account ID in the Authorization header. |
| PERMISSION_REQUIRED | 403 Forbidden | You do not have permission to use the service. Please contact our support team for more information. |
| (none) | 413 Content Too Large | This status is returned when the request body is larger than 65,536 bytes. The response does not have a JSON body. |
| (none) | 429 Too Many Requests | MaxMind rate-limited the request, usually because of excessive earlier error responses. The response may not include a JSON body. |
| SERVER_ERROR | 500 Internal Server Error | There was an error when processing this request. |
| (none) | 503 Service Unavailable | There is a problem with the web service server. You can try this request again later. |
Example using curl
curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
--user 1:foo \
-X POST \
-v \
-d '{"ip_address":"1.2.3.4","tag":"suspected_fraud","transaction_id":"1"}' \
https://minfraud.maxmind.com/minfraud/v2.0/transactions/report