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Stripe decline code: fraudulent

Fraudulent — The issuer flagged the charge as suspected fraud.

Common cause

Issuer's fraud system blocked the charge — the customer didn't necessarily do anything wrong.

Recovery strategy

Retry strategy	Don't retry
Customer-facing action	Manual review case-by-case
Recovery rate (retry only)	~5%
Recovery rate (with customer flow)	~30%

What to do, in order

Don't auto-retry — increases your account's fraud signal at issuers and at Stripe. Manual review per case. For known-good customers, ask them to call their issuer.

Code example

The recommended Stripe Customer Portal session for the recovery flow:

session = stripe.billing_portal.Session.create(
    customer=customer_id,
    return_url="https://yourapp.com/billing/thanks",
    flow_data={"type": "payment_method_update"},
)
update_link = session.url

Where this fits in the bigger picture

fraudulent is one of dozens of decline codes Stripe returns; recovery rates vary by code by 5x or more. The recovery-rate reference covers the full set; the card-update flow article covers the customer-facing side; dunning emails covers how to write the messages.

DunningKit's open-source CLI parses your Stripe failed-charges CSV and gives you the breakdown by code, with recoverable-revenue estimates. pip install dunningkit.