# Suspicious orders piling up in your store?

> A sudden run of orders - often the same product, different cards, odd shipping combinations - is a familiar pattern: someone testing stolen card numbers against your checkout. The email address on each order is one of the fastest things to check, and it's usually the cheapest tell.

## What the pattern usually looks like

Card testing doesn't need a real customer on the other end - it needs an order to go through so the fraudster learns which stolen card numbers still work. The giveaway is rarely subtle once you're looking for it: a burst of orders in a short window, mismatched billing and shipping details, and email addresses that are disposable, freshly made, or simply don't exist.

## Check the address before you ship

Run the order's email through the verifier. A nonexistent address or a known disposable domain on an order that already looks odd is a strong signal to hold it for manual review rather than auto-fulfilling. A real, existing address doesn't clear the order on its own - it just means the email check isn't what's flagging it.

## Checking a batch you already suspect

If you've already got a pile of orders you're unsure about - from a specific day, a specific product, a specific spike - paste the emails into the free list checker to see how many are disposable, malformed, or don't exist, before deciding whether to hold or cancel the batch.

## What this won't catch

A fraudster using a real email address - their own, or someone else's they have access to - won't be flagged by an email check. This is one signal, not a fraud score: pair it with your payment processor's own signals (card velocity, AVS mismatch, device fingerprinting) rather than relying on it alone.

## Questions

**Does checking the email slow down checkout?**
A single check returns in well under a second, so it's fast enough to run inline before an order is marked fulfilled, not just after the fact.

**Will this stop card testing completely?**
No. It catches orders using disposable or nonexistent addresses, which is a large share of casual card testing, but a fraudster using a real address needs a payment-fraud signal, not an email check, to catch.

**Can I check orders I already shipped?**
Yes, there's no reason you can't check retroactively - it just won't undo a shipment already sent. Checking before fulfillment is what actually prevents the loss.

Tool: [Check a suspicious order's email](https://www.emcheq.com/tools/email-verifier)