How to Stop Carding Attack in Magento 2
Why Magento 2 Stores Need Serious Carding Protection?
Magento 2 powers thousands of fast-growing eCommerce sites — which also makes it a hot target for carding bots. Many attackers treat Magento checkouts as a playground for testing stolen credit cards. If you manage a Magento 2 site, you need strong anti-carding measures. In this guide, we’ll show how carding works, why Magento sites get targeted, and what technical steps you can take to shut down attacks for good.
What Is a Carding Attack?
Carding is when bots or scripts use your checkout page to test stolen credit card numbers. Bots or scripts run hundreds of small purchases to find which cards are valid. The process is automated, stealthy, and dangerous.
Why Magento Sites Are a Prime Target
Magento sites often provide a seamless checkout experience, offering powerful open-source extensions that attackers can easily scan and exploit. With minimal friction during checkout, bots can navigate and submit fake orders quickly, making it an attractive target for carding attacks. Additionally, many Magento stores lack built-in anti-bot protections at checkout by default. Attackers love the flexibility that Magento offers, as it allows them to deploy their tactics and test stolen card data without many barriers. This makes it crucial for store owners to add extra layers of security.
Signs of Carding Activity on a Magento Store
If you notice a sudden spike in payment declines within a short time frame, it might be a sign of a carding attack on your Magento store. Bots typically flood checkout pages with multiple transactions using stolen card data, hoping some will succeed. These bots often mimic the same user-agent while rotating IP addresses, making it harder to spot them at first glance. Other warning signs include orders made with fake or temporary email addresses and small-value transactions, which are commonly used to test stolen cards. Keeping an eye on these indicators can help you detect and stop carding attempts before they hurt your business.
Carding Will Hurt More Than Your Checkout
If you ignore the signs of a carding attack, it’s not just your checkout that suffers. Your merchant account can be frozen if fraud rates climb too high, cutting off your ability to accept payments altogether. Bots also flood your site with fake orders, leading to bouncebacks that can tank your email deliverability and hurt your brand’s reputation. Worse still, chargebacks and dispute fees can pile up quickly, draining your profits and creating endless headaches. Bot traffic also slows your site performance, making it harder for legitimate customers to shop. Ignoring these issues means putting your entire store at risk.
Block Disposable Email Domains Early
One of the easiest ways to protect your Magento store from carding attacks is to block disposable email domains at checkout. By using a filter or plugin that rejects addresses from common spam providers like maildrop.cc, mailinator.com, temp-mail.org, and dispostable.com, you can dramatically reduce fraudulent activity. Stopping these emails early cuts off 90% of bot checkouts before payment even happens, saving you time, money, and headaches down the road. It’s a simple yet effective step every store should take.
Use Magento’s Built-In Security Settings + Add-On Tools
Protecting your Magento store starts with using the built-in security settings. Make sure you enable CAPTCHA for account creation and checkout pages to block automated bots. Additionally, use 3D Secure for credit card payments to add an extra layer of verification and turn on admin notifications for failed payments so you can monitor suspicious activity in real time. To make your store even more secure, combine these built-in settings with a plugin that focuses on checkout-specific protection. This dual approach ensures you’re covering all the bases against carding attacks and keeping your business safe.
Configure Checkout Rate Limits by Device
To defend against carding attacks on your Magento store, it’s smart to configure checkout rate limits by device. For example, you can set a rule allowing a maximum of three orders per 10 minutes for each device. If that limit is breached, the system can automatically block that device, preventing further fraudulent attempts.
With Checkout Protection’s Magento 2 backend panel, setting up these custom rules is easy. You can also log blocked attempts for later review, giving you valuable insights into suspicious activity. This setup helps keep your checkout process safe and ensures that real customers aren’t affected by fraud.
Install Checkout Protection for Magento 2
Checkout Protection was designed to give Magento 2 stores a powerful and easy-to-use solution for protecting against carding attacks. We know firsthand how devastating these attacks can be — from chargebacks and account freezes to spam orders and a wrecked email reputation. That’s why we built Checkout Protection with features usually reserved for enterprise-grade systems, so every store owner can fight back against fraudsters.
Our module offers smart fingerprint-based blocking that tracks each unique device rather than just relying on outdated IP bans. Combined with custom rate limiting per device, this means you can block suspicious activity before it even reaches your checkout page. It also features disposable email filters to block common spam addresses like maildrop.cc and temp-mail.org, stopping fraudulent orders in their tracks.
Everything is controlled from an easy-to-use backend panel that logs blocked attempts and lets you review suspicious activity at a glance. The best part? You don’t need to mess with complicated APIs or external services. Just install the module, set your rules, and protect your Magento store with confidence.
