Glossary · Detection & reputation
Fraud score
A single number that fraud-detection services assign to an IP address to summarise how risky traffic from it looks.
A fraud score compresses everything a risk service knows about an address into one figure, is it a proxy or VPN, what is its network, does it carry a history of abuse, how does its behaviour read, so that a site can act on a single threshold instead of weighing signals itself. It is IP reputation packaged for an instant yes-or-no.
Checkout and signup flows lean on it heavily. A high score can silently add friction, an extra verification, a declined payment, a shadow-ban, without ever telling the visitor a score was the reason, which makes it one of the least visible ways an address shapes what you can do.
Because the score keys largely on network type and history, it rewards the same things every other detection layer does: a genuine residential or mobile address, a clean record, behaviour that does not stand out. It is less a separate obstacle than the same reputation, read through a different lens.
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