Why IPQualityScore is the Leader in IP Fraud Detection & Risk Scoring
IPQualityScore (IPQS) is recognized as the industry leader in IP fraud detection because we go beyond simple geolocation and blacklist checks. Our algorithms are trained on billions of real-world data points collected from our own proprietary network of honeypots, fraud traps, and abuse sensors, deployed across high-traffic web and mobile environments worldwide.
This intelligence allows us to detect threats before they appear in public blocklists — meaning you can block bad actors faster, prevent chargebacks, and maintain a safe user base.
Global Honeypot Network for Real-Time IP Fraud Detection
Unlike providers that rely solely on third-party feeds, IPQS maintains a global network of fraud detection honeypots and deception traps in over 150 countries. These sensors continuously monitor:
- Fake accounts, account creation fraud, and ATO attacks
- Botnet and automated attack traffic
- Proxies, VPNs, and anonymizing services
- Stolen credential use and brute force attempts
- High-volume spam and phishing campaigns
By harvesting live malicious traffic data, our system builds risk profiles in real time, delivering accurate IP risk scores that adapt instantly to emerging threats.
Protect your business from fraud, abuse, and malicious traffic with the most accurate IP fraud scoring tool
Instantly detect high-risk users, bots, proxies, and VPNs with IPQualityScore's real-time IP Risk Score API & checker.
Understanding IP Fraud Score Ranges
An IP fraud score is a numerical risk rating that estimates the likelihood an IP address is associated with fraud, abuse, automation, anonymization technologies, or other suspicious activity. IPQS assigns every IP address an IP fraud score ranging from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating greater risk and a higher probability of fraudulent behavior.
IP fraud scores help businesses evaluate user trustworthiness before allowing registrations, logins, purchases, account changes, and other high-risk actions. While no single signal should be used in isolation, understanding IP fraud score ranges can help organizations make more informed fraud prevention decisions.
| IP Fraud Score | Risk Level | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 0-39 | Low Risk | Minimal evidence of fraud or abuse |
| 40-75 | Suspicious | Some risk indicators present and additional review may be warranted |
| 76-84 | Risky | Elevated likelihood of suspicious activity or abuse |
| 85-89 | High Risk | Strong evidence of fraud-related indicators |
| 90-100 | Fraudulent | Very high probability of fraud, abuse, automation, or malicious activity |
IP Fraud Score 0-39: Low Risk
An IP fraud score between 0 and 39 generally indicates a trustworthy IP address with little evidence of suspicious activity. These IPs are often associated with legitimate residential users, established businesses, and reputable internet service providers with limited abuse history.
IP Fraud Score 40-75: Suspicious
An IP fraud score between 40 and 75 may indicate suspicious behavior, minor reputation concerns, or risk signals that warrant closer evaluation. While many users in this range may still be legitimate, organizations often use additional verification methods to reduce risk before approving sensitive actions.
IP Fraud Score 76-84: Risky
An IP fraud score between 76 and 84 suggests elevated risk and a higher likelihood of abusive behavior. These IP addresses may exhibit characteristics associated with anonymization technologies, unusual traffic patterns, or suspicious activity that differs from normal user behavior.
IP Fraud Score 85-89: High Risk
An IP fraud score between 85 and 89 indicates strong evidence of suspicious activity. High-risk IP addresses are frequently associated with increased abuse reports, proxy servers, VPN services, bot activity, automated account creation, credential stuffing attacks, and networks or ASNs with a significant history of abuse.
IP Fraud Score 90-100: Fraudulent
An IP fraud score above 90 indicates a very high likelihood of fraud or malicious behavior. These IP addresses frequently exhibit multiple high-risk indicators and are commonly associated with automated attacks, residential proxy networks, private VPN services, fake account creation, spam campaigns, account takeover attempts, chargebacks, digital impersonation, and other forms of online abuse. IP addresses in this high risk threshold are typically also reported as abusive by our partners in Fraud Fusion, IPQS' proprietary fraud reporting consortium.
What Is Considered a Good IP Fraud Score?
A good IP fraud score is generally a low score that indicates little evidence of suspicious activity. Most legitimate users will have an IP fraud score below 40, although acceptable thresholds vary depending on industry, risk tolerance, and business requirements.
What Is Considered a High IP Fraud Score?
Many organizations consider an IP fraud score above 75 to represent elevated risk. IP fraud scores above 85 often indicate strong evidence of abuse, while scores above 90 frequently correlate with fraudulent activity, anonymization services, automated attacks, or other malicious behavior.
How Businesses Use IP Fraud Scores
Organizations use IP fraud scores to identify high-risk users before fraud occurs. Common use cases include preventing fake account creation, detecting bots, stopping account takeover attempts, reducing payment fraud, limiting promotion abuse, detecting SMS pumping attacks, and improving user verification workflows.
For the most accurate risk assessment, IP fraud scores should be combined with additional intelligence such as IP reputation analysis, proxy and VPN detection, device fingerprinting, phone verification, email intelligence, and behavioral analysis. Combining multiple fraud signals provides a more complete picture of risk and helps improve fraud detection accuracy.
IP Reputation vs IP Fraud Score: What's the Difference?
IP reputation and IP fraud scores are closely related, but they measure different aspects of risk. While both help organizations evaluate the trustworthiness of an IP address, they serve distinct purposes within a fraud prevention strategy.
An IP reputation score reflects the historical trustworthiness of an IP address based on observed behavior, abuse reports, network reputation, spam activity, and other long-term indicators. An IP fraud score, on the other hand, estimates the likelihood that an IP address is currently being used for fraud, abuse, automation, or other malicious activity.
| IP Reputation | IP Fraud Score |
|---|---|
| Measures long-term trustworthiness | Measures current fraud risk |
| Based on historical behavior | Based on real-time risk indicators |
| Focuses on reputation and abuse history | Focuses on fraud likelihood and suspicious activity |
| Changes gradually over time | Can change rapidly as risk conditions evolve |
| Provides trust and reputation context | Provides actionable fraud prevention intelligence |
What Does IP Reputation Measure?
IP reputation helps determine whether an IP address has historically demonstrated trustworthy or abusive behavior. Reputation systems evaluate signals such as spam activity, abuse complaints, bot traffic, malicious behavior, network reputation, and known threat intelligence associated with an IP address or network.
Organizations commonly use IP reputation analysis to identify suspicious infrastructure, reduce spam, improve security controls, and better understand the historical trustworthiness of incoming traffic.
What Does an IP Fraud Score Measure?
An IP fraud score evaluates the likelihood that an IP address is currently associated with fraudulent activity. Fraud scoring systems analyze a broad range of real-time risk signals including proxy detection, VPN usage, TOR activity, bot behavior, automation indicators, location spoofing, abuse intelligence, behavioral anomalies, and suspicious traffic patterns.
Because fraud scoring focuses on active risk assessment, it can often identify emerging threats more quickly than reputation data alone.
Why Both Signals Matter
An IP address may have a relatively clean reputation history while simultaneously exhibiting suspicious behavior that increases its fraud score. Likewise, an IP address with moderate reputation concerns may currently present little immediate fraud risk.
By combining IP reputation intelligence with real-time IP fraud scores, businesses gain a more complete understanding of both historical trustworthiness and current risk exposure.
Recent Fraud Score Tests
The following IP addresses had recent IP Reputation checks to check their fraud score.
How IP Fraud Scoring & IP Risk Analysis Work at IPQualityScore
Every IP address scanned by IPQS is evaluated using multi-layered risk scoring analysis, powered by the IPQS honeypot threat network. Our cyber traps & sensors quickly identify newly compromised devices that are active within botnets, proxy networks, TOR exit nodes, or VPN services. This data is then paired with live forensic checks that identify residential proxy connections, scalable abuse software, emulators, and similar high risk behavior signals. High risk IP addresses will always score at 90 or higher, when our system determines high confidence in identifying a malicious IP address.
Our in-depth IP risk scoring check includes the following categories:
- Behavioral Signals - User interaction patterns, request velocity, and automation markers s
- Network Reputation - ASN, ISP, and subnet analysis for prior abuse
- Anonymizer Detection - VPN, proxy, and Tor fingerprinting
- Geolocation Integrity - Checking for spoofed or impossible travel patternsStolen credential use and brute force attempts
- Historical Abuse - IP fraud history from our trap network and partner intelligence feedsHigh-volume spam and phishing campaigns
The result is an IP fraud score from 0-100, with transparent and actionable metrics that can be used to immediately protect against digital abuse.
Adaptive IP Risk Scoring for Evolving Fraud & Cyber Threats
Fraudsters are constantly evolving — so is our IP intelligence scoring engine. IPQS risk models are retrained daily, incorporating intelligence from global partners and payment processors, newly compromised IP addresses through malware or adware, and identifying new connections within residential proxy networks.
This adaptive approach ensures your fraud detection stays one step ahead. IPQS provides powerful digital risk signals for IP addresses, as well as email addresses, phone numbers, and domains/URLs.
Why Businesses Trust IPQualityScore for Accurate IP Fraud Detection
Competitors often update their threat data once a day or less — IPQS processes updates in real time. Because our honeypot network is owned and operated by us, we're not limited by third-party data latency or licensing restrictions.
- Faster detection of new fraud rings
- Lower false positives through behavioral context
- Higher block rates for truly bad traffic, without hurting conversion rates or user experience
Pair IPQS with your existing fraud detection services, or let IPQS do the heavy lifting as your primary fraud detection software.
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