Stolen Card Decline Code: Meaning, Stats, and How To Fix?
Stolen cards are an unusual payment error returned by banks. This occurs when fraudsters test the validity of stolen cards on your site. It’s a hard decline, meaning you cannot retry the payment.
What Does Stolen Card Decline Code Mean?
A stolen card decline in Stripe refers to a situation where a payment attempt is declined because the card was rejected because it stolen.
The decline code originates from the card issuing bank and is further grouped by card networks. Stripe, Paddle, Braintree further group these codes and return a code to you.
Churnkey can help reduce voluntary and involuntary churn. To get started, sign up for Churnkey or book a demo.
Stolen Card Decline Is Rarer
There are efforts made by Visa, Mastercard, and other card networks to encourage more specific decline codes which would help merchants and customers resolve errors faster. There's been a steady industry over the years.
These are the top 5 decline codes, broken down by region.
Read about all other decline codes here.
Recover Failed Payments With Churnkey
Churnkey is a powerful churn software. We help companies save 20-40% of the revenue that they would have otherwise lost to churn. When you lose revenue due to a failed payment, we have four products that tackle it:
- Churn Metrics (Free): Get a free, visual analysis of your churn, especially the breakdown between involuntary and voluntary churn. This will help guide your churn reduction strategy.
- Dunning Campaigns: Dunning campaigns allow for a personalized, one-click payment recovery. For example, say you want people to update their cards? If Precision Retries can't recover the payment, Dunning will pick up where it left off.
- Reactivations: Reactivations target lost customers with relevant offers.
- Precision Retries: Precision Retries intelligently retry cards well within the limits and can be layered on top of Stripe's smart retries for maximum revenue boost. You can protect any revenue lost due to soft declines like do not honor, insufficient funds, and generic declines, in as little as 15-minutes. Precision Retries integrate natively with Stripe. Implementing it requires no code.
Churnkey is also SOC-2 compliant and has robust security protocols to keep your data secured. We protect over $2B in subscription revenue across our portfolio of companies.
To get started, sign up for Churnkey or book a demo.
Stolen Card is a Hard Decline
Declines can be categorized into two main types:
- Soft Declines: Soft declines are temporary errors. They can sometimes be resolved by retrying the transaction. Stolen Card is not a soft decline.
- Hard Declines: If the customer's card was stolen, it's a hard decline. You should not retry. Neither does Churnkey. Hard declines like incorrect card number need to be intervened via dunning campaigns, failed payment walls, and one-click recovery.
Learn more about types of declines:
Khushi Lunkad
Why Are They Trying Stolen Cards for Your Business?
Fraudsters use your site to test if stolen card numbers are valid by making small purchases. If your site lacks robust security measures or sells high-demand products, it may be an easy target.
How to Fix Stolen Card Declines?
While stolen cards are hard to manage, since it's a fraudulent transaction, your best bet is moving on.
Payment providers like Stripe and Chargebee invest a lot of resources into protecting businesses from fraud. Stripe Radar is one such product that lets you configure your risk appetite.
What About Other Decline Codes?
However, there are other payment decline errors that you can recover with Churnkey, such as "do not honor," "insufficient funds," etc.
1. Retry The Payment
Context: Lots of errors are a soft decline, which means that it can be retried. If it were a hard decline like 'fraud', you would not be allowed to retry the payment.
Caution: Be aware of retry limits—Mastercard allows 35 attempts and Visa 15 within 30 days. Exceeding these limits can lead to fines as high as $15,000.
Solution: Layer on Churnkey's Precision Retries, which recover up to 89% of failed payments. Integrating Stripe takes as little as 15-minutes. It listens to the decline reason provided by the card issuer, and will only retry cards conditionally based on this reason. For instance, we'll retry on insufficient funds, do not honor, generic decline, or try again later, but if we get a decline code like stolen card or card velocity exceeded, Churnkey won't attempt further retries through either precision retries or email-attached auto retries.
To get started, sign up for Churnkey or book a demo.
2. Request Card Change
Context: Address restricted, expired, or virtual cards by asking customers to enter a different card. This requires customer action but is most likely to succeed simply because a new card is added in.
Caution: Ensure the process is seamless with no logins or multi-step verifications.
Solution: Churnkey provides a frictionless dunning (email + SMS) platform that allows customers to update their cards easily, with options for advanced personalization (plan name, subscription age, trialing, etc.). You can also use Churnkey's hosted page for stronger security compliance.
3. Leverage Offers and Partial Payments
Context: Sometimes customers will quietly let their cards decline on purpose. Offer discounts and partial payments that auto-apply to their account.
Caution: Manage potential system abuse when offering discounts.
Solution: Implement Churnkey's Dunning Offers to entice customers to update their cards with incentives like partial payments or automatic discount codes. Churnkey has anti-abuse built in.
4. Feature Blocking
Context: Blocked product access can prompt action. Users can escalate this issue to their billing manager.
Caution: Prevent unpaid usage when doing so. Depending on your settings, users may be prevented from accessing certain features.
Solution: With Churnkey, you can dynamically block feature access for past-due accounts. And customers can update their payment details directly inline without navigating elsewhere.
To get started, sign up for Churnkey or book a demo.
5. Monitor Metrics
Context: Since decline codes are confusing, what you can rely on are metrics. Try different offers and keep a close eye on the metrics to see what changes. Is voluntary churn higher than involuntary churn? Is there a certain decline code surfacing higher than others? Is there a certain card type that declines more than others? Use metrics to gauge the effectiveness of your retention strategies.
Solution: You don’t have time to parse overloaded charts and confusing terminology. Churnkey’s best-in-class analytics speak plainly—helping you and your team track boosted revenue, offer uptake, recovery rates, and more. You can reach out to our support team for benchmarks.
Case Studies
1. Veed.io
Veed.io successfully leveraged tailored discounts and pause options, saving nearly 5,000 canceling customers. Utilizing Churnkey's Precision Retries and Dunning Offers, they recovered over 14,000 failed payments, achieving a 35% increase in their save rate. Read Veed.io's case study.
2. Sudowrite
Sudowrite boosted revenue by over six figures within a year across various churn channels by integrating Churnkey voluntary and involuntary suite into their operations. Read Sudowrite's case study.
FAQs
What does stolen card mean?
Stolen card is a hard decline code used by banks to indicate a customer's card is stolen. You cannot retry the card. Instead focus on other payment decline codes to recover involuntary churn. This might be via optimized dunning campaigns, feature blocking, and a host of other involuntary churn reduction products in Churnkey.
