Stripe decline code: fraudulent

Stripe's own fraud detection, not the issuer, stopped this payment. The instruction not to disclose the reason is not a nicety: telling someone their payment was flagged as fraudulent tells a fraudster exactly what your defences noticed, and tells a legitimate customer they are under suspicion. Show the same message you show for every other decline.

• Stripe Radar's machine-learning model scored the payment as high risk.
• A Radar rule you configured matched the payment.
• Signals such as a mismatched billing country, a high-risk IP, or a card being tried repeatedly with different details.
• A genuine customer caught by a rule tuned more tightly than intended — false positives are real and worth monitoring.

1. Show a generic decline message. Stripe's documentation is explicit that the specific reason must not be reported to the customer.
2. Review the payment in the Dashboard, where the risk evaluation and any rule that fired are visible.
3. If the false-positive rate is high, tune your Radar rules — a rule that blocks good customers costs more than the fraud it prevents.
4. Do not retry. A payment Stripe considers fraudulent will be blocked again, and repeated attempts strengthen the signal.

• Stripe generic_declinegeneric_decline
• Stripe card_declinedcard_declined
• Stripe lost_cardlost_card

• Card test toolkit

Should I tell the customer the payment was flagged as fraudulent?

No, and Stripe's documentation says so directly: do not report more detailed information to your customer, present it in the same manner as a generic decline. Naming the reason tells someone probing your defences what worked, and accuses a legitimate customer of something they did not do.