Feature Request: Fraud Prevention Options

4. Void transactions from PayPal accounts registered in a different country than the customer’s WooCommerce account or billing email address.

Hi @mrclayton ,

Thank you for your quick and open response, I appreciate you exploring these suggestions.

Why these conditional void rules matter — especially for merchants selling digital goods:

1. Digital goods are prime targets for fraudsters.
   • Fraud consumes about 9.7% of revenue at digital‑only merchants — compared to 8% for general e‑commerce and 4.2% fraud rates in other e‑commerce sectors.
   • Fraudsters are drawn to digital products because there’s no shipping address required — making it easy to resell codes, subscriptions, or downloads instantly.
2. PayPal is widely exploited for scams.
   • In the U.S., 28% of reported scam payments in 2023 involved PayPal — more than any other payment app.
   • Moreover, over 60% of merchants surveyed view PayPal as a top fraud channel.
3. Account takeover and credential misuse are rampant.
   • Phishers compromise accounts in large numbers — 35% of recipients open phishing emails and 97% struggle to detect them.
   • Fraudsters then use stolen credentials to make unauthorized purchases.
4. Digital goods merchants lack downstream protections.
   • PayPal’s seller protection does not cover intangible goods — leaving merchants vulnerable to chargebacks long after delivery.
   • Most of the seller are saying, “we’re finding it near impossible to sell digital goods due to digital goods having no seller protection on PayPal…”

How your feature suggestions help mitigate these risks:

• Rule #1 (Payment email ≠ billing email): Helps detect hijacked or mismatched accounts upfront.
• Rule #2 (Non‑verified PayPal accounts): Prevents fraudsters using newly created or unverified accounts.
• Rule #3 & #4 (Geolocation rules): Blocks cross‑country mismatches that often point to stolen accounts or proxy use.

These measures, offered as optional but structured rules, would be invaluable to thousands of merchants who:

• Sell instantly delivered digital items — resellers love PayPal’s ease and lack of address checks.
• Face high chargeback/operation costs — digital‑goods merchants often spend 20% of budgets on fraud management.
• Have little to no recourse when chargebacks hit — they cannot rely on PayPal Seller Protection for digital goods.

These conditional void rules don’t just make sense — they’re essential defenses in the authorize‑review‑capture workflow. They’d dramatically reduce merchant exposure to stolen‑account abuse, chargeback nightmares, and fraud losses — especially in the vulnerable digital‑goods segment.

I’d be happy to help test the feature or provide further input. Thank you for considering these enhancements — they could make a real difference for thousands of merchants and put your plugin at the forefront of fraud‑aware WooCommerce solutions.

Best regards,
Youssef

Just to add one final point — we’ve carefully reviewed the PayPal API response during the authorization step, and we can confirm with certainty that the following buyer data is available:

• ✅ Email Address [email_address]
• ✅ Country [country_code]
• ✅ Verification Status [account_status]

So, from a technical standpoint, we’re 100% sure that the rules we’ve suggested — including email mismatch detection, unverified account filtering, and country-based validation — can be implemented cleanly within your plugin’s authorize-review flow.

It’s definitely possible to build these rules:

• Auto-Void if PayPal email ≠ WooCommerce verified email (User’s billing_email)
• Auto-Void if account is not verified
• Auto-Void if country mismatch (User’s billing_country)
• Auto-capture if no rules are triggered

If you add these rule-based conditions with optional auto-capture or auto-void actions, your plugin will genuinely become the most powerful and secure PayPal WooCommerce plugin on the market — especially for digital goods sellers like us.

We’ve tested nearly every alternative, and nothing comes close to what you’re offering. These few enhancements would close the final gap and set a new standard in fraud prevention for PayPal on WooCommerce.

Thanks again for being open to feedback — really appreciate the great work you’re doing.

Hi @mrclayton ,

Thanks for the thoughtful response!

To clarify — we’re definitely aiming to fully automate both the capture and the void actions, based on the defined conditions. The ideal flow is:

• If all fraud checks pass → Auto-Capture
• If any key rule fails → Auto-Void

We agree that automation is especially valuable in the context of digital goods, where fast delivery and fraud risk go hand-in-hand. Manual review slows things down and can be avoided if intelligent, customizable rules are in place.

We’d also love to see these conditional rules easily configurable from the plugin’s settings page — with the ability to:

• Enable/disable specific checks (user email match, user country match, user account verification)
• Define the action taken when conditions are met or failed (capture, void, or leave authorized)
• Possibly introduce a new dropdown setting like:
  Transaction Type
  ▸ Authorize → Auto-Capture & Auto-Void
  ▸ Capture
  ▸ Authorize

This would give store owners the flexibility to tailor the behavior to their specific fraud risks and operational needs.

Thanks again for the collaboration — we’re excited about where this is heading!

Best Regards,
Youssef

Hi @mrclayton ,

I’ll go ahead and create a support ticket via the path you mentioned so you have all the necessary information. I’m glad to contribute and look forward to seeing the new features in version 1.1.8

Kind regards,
Youssef