What is Early fraud warnings?

Early fraud warnings (EFWs) are messages from Visa and Mastercard that card issuers on these two networks generate to flag payments they suspect might be fraudulent.

These aren’t informational notes from the card networks. EFWs do sometimes provide the opportunity for you to refund a fraudulent payment before it becomes a fraud dispute, but they’re equally as important when used as a metric by the networks to measure a business’s propensity for fraudulent transactions. Visa in particular counts these fraud warnings toward identification in their VFMP monitoring program.