How to Block and Blacklist Fraudulent Customers on Shopify

Quick answer: Shopify has no built-in “block customer” button. To keep repeat offenders out, you have three options: use Shopify Flow to automatically cancel or hold orders that match your blocklist (email, phone, address, risk level), use a third-party blocking app for IP and address-level blocks, or use Chargeflow Prevent to score every order and stop risky ones before fulfillment. Note that Shopify retired its Fraud Filter app on January 31, 2025, so blocklist rules now live in Shopify Flow.

Shopify merchant Steve writes in the Shopify Community, “We have a problematic customer that we no longer wish to deal with. Is there a way to block/blacklist customers in Shopify? Fraud Filter does not work because it permits orders to be placed and thus we're charged transaction fees. We need a block/spam filter in place of pre-checkout. Can anyone advise?”

Steve is not alone in this dilemma.

Another user named Bribri writes, “I'm in the process of moving my online store to Shopify. After being in business online for 20+ years I have a list of blacklisted/banned customers. Mostly from fraud, chargebacks, jerks, etc, who try to place orders every week. How do I block their name, shipping/billing address, phone number, email etc. from placing orders?”

So today we want to share useful information to help you stop fraudulent shoppers from taking advantage of you.

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How Fraudulent Transactions Affect Your Shopify Store

Fraudulent transactions can kill your Shopify store.

Shopify, like all eCommerce marketplaces, does not accommodate high fraud cases. They monitor merchants for excessive fraud. Any uptick in a merchant’s fraud stats attracts increased scrutiny and fines.

For example, a high chargeback rate will result in account suspension to protect the platform's integrity. But there are other ways fraudulent transactions affect a merchant’s Shopify store, such as:

• Revenue Hemorrhage: Fraudulent transactions lead to direct financial hemorrhage because you lose the sale amount and incur additional fees from payment providers.
• Brand Impairment: While you can't readily quantify the cost of brand impairment due to fraudulent transactions, we know that a high rate of fraudulent transactions tarnishes a store's reputation. Shoppers will perceive your site as unsafe, meaning your conversion rate will take a nosedive.
• Excessive Overhead Cost: Fraud remediation requires that you allocate extra budget to human resources, and in many cases, technology tools. This increases your operational expenses significantly.
• Sales Cannibalization: Merchants have seen goods that were stolen through chargeback fraud appearing in secondary markets. Fraudulent transactions also lead to inventory management issues like discrepancies and even stockouts for legitimate customers.
• Payment Processing Challenges: High chargeback rates will force your Shopify payment processor to impose penalties, raise transaction fees, or even terminate your account.
• Legal Issues: Fraudulent transactions equally carry legal consequences in extreme cases, like when excessive personal data is compromised. Or you fail to abide by payment-related compliance rules.

With all that said, let’s examine how to block and blacklist fraud perps on Shopify.

How to Block and Blacklist Fraudulent Customers on Shopify

If you’re like Steve or BriBri, you know that peak seasons, such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the holidays, often see a significant spike in fraud cases. I mean the numbers shoot through the roof.

For instance, TransUnion reported that 3.6% of global eCommerce transactions during the 2023 holiday season were suspected of fraud. The report also noted that 2.4% of transactions during the Cyber Five days were flagged as potentially fraudulent.

Here’s how to prevent such losses:

Option 1: Use Shopify’s Built-in Tools (Shopify Flow and Fraud Analysis)

Note: Shopify retired its Fraud Filter app on January 31, 2025. If you relied on Fraud Filter blocklists, those rules now need to be recreated in Shopify Flow, Shopify’s free automation tool for paid plans.

Shopify Flow lets you build the same blacklist logic: it watches every new order and automatically cancels, holds, or tags orders that match your banned-customer criteria (email, phone number, shipping address, or Shopify’s own fraud risk level).

How to Blacklist Customers with Shopify Flow

1. Install Shopify Flow from the Shopify App Store (free on paid plans).
2. Click “Create workflow” and choose the “Order created” trigger.
3. Add a condition that matches your blocklist: customer email, phone number, shipping address, or “Order risk level is High” from Shopify’s built-in fraud analysis. You can chain multiple conditions with OR logic to cover a full banned list.
4. Add an action: cancel the order (with restock and optional refund), hold fulfillment for manual review, or add a tag like “blacklisted” so your team catches it.
5. Turn the workflow on and test it with a dummy order.

Pair your Flow rules with Shopify’s built-in fraud analysis, which flags every order as low, medium, or high risk based on signals like AVS/CVV mismatches, IP location, and payment attempts. High-risk indicators appear directly on the order page.

The limitation: like the old Fraud Filter, Flow acts after checkout. The order is placed first and canceled after, which is exactly what frustrated Steve. Determined repeat offenders also rotate emails, addresses, and devices to slip past static blocklists. Third-party blocking apps on the Shopify App Store can add IP-level and address-level blocks before checkout, but static blocks share the same weakness: they only stop the identities you already know about.

That brings us to our next option for blocking and blacklisting fraudulent customers on Shopify:

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Option 2: Use Chargeflow Prevent to Stop Fraudulent Purchases

Prevent evaluates post-checkout signals and blocks, pauses, or requires verification for risky orders.

Under the hood, Chargeflow Prevent analyzes device, IP, email, payment, and behavioral signals and produces a single risk score. That score drives rules that automatically cancel high-risk orders, pause orders for manual review, or require verification so legitimate orders move on to fulfillment. The screenshot below shows ChargeScore and state/status tags so teams can prioritize cases and see which orders were paused, canceled, or resolved.

Chargeflow's Shopify-native app provides a more excellent and holistic strategy for managing fraudulent transactions. The automated chargeback solution leverages advanced fraud filtering and identification systems to ensure you don't process transactions that eventually cost you more money.

The app serves as your powerful, ruthless, and reliable linebacker in safeguarding your store from various fraud cases, including bots, chargebacks, fake accounts, payments, phishing, and so on. Unlike a static blocklist, Prevent scores every order, so it catches bad actors you haven't seen before, not just the ones already on your list.

How Chargeflow Protects Shopify Merchants from Fraud

Chargeflow is a chargeback and dispute automation solution for eCommerce. It helps eCommerce companies manage disputes and recover lost revenue from fraud perps by automating workflows, providing insights into chargeback reason codes, and disputing chargebacks on autopilot.

This dashboard shows how Chargeflow surfaces risky post-purchase activity and scores disputes using ChargeScore. Scores feed automated flows so high-risk cases can be paused, flagged, or escalated to a human expert. Status tags and case state let teams see which orders were paused, canceled, or won at a glance.

Chargeflow integrated with Shopify in 2021 and is a top-rated fraud prevention app on the Shopify App Store. Let's examine how Chargeflow helps you prevent chargeback fraud on Shopify:

Step 1: Installation and Integration

Onboarding Chargeflow’s native Shopify app requires no complicated process. After you’ve installed the app from Shopify App Store, the rest is a breeze:

• Seamless 2-click integration, with no development needed.
• The app fully integrates with major processors like Shopify Payments, PayPal, Payflow, Stripe, and Braintree, with other integrations in progress. See what data we extract from your system for fraud prevention.
• Ensure that your staff has the appropriate permissions to access Chargeflow seamlessly. These permissions include:
  1. Orders
  2. Customers
  3. Apps and Channel Permissions - Specific apps and sales channels - Chargeflow.

Step 2: Benchmarking for Case Management

Chargeflow securely fetches new disputes and chargebacks in real time from your connected payment processors. This data goes into calculating your ChargeScore®, Chargeflow’s proprietary algorithm for dispute success rate.

Step 3: Automated Dispute Response

Chargeflow automates the response process by generating tailored dispute responses based on the chargeback reason code and extended order insights. This response creation is facilitated by a proprietary framework called ChargeResponse. How ChargeResponse works:

• 🧲 It links the dispute to its corresponding order data from the merchant’s eCommerce platform.
• 🔬 It understands the company’s background and the chargeback reason after analyzing the company's expertise and the dispute reason.
• 🌐 It uses 50+ data points, data enrichment systems, and several other aggregates to cross-reference relevant data.
• 📋 It analyzes the merchant’s policies and terms and provides the right sections that support the compelling evidence and improve its winning chances.
• 📝 Most importantly, the unique and powerful Machine Learning Algorithm keeps learning from your processes to maximize outcomes.

Step 4: Human-proofing and Evidence Submission

Your account's Dispute Expert double-checks the dispute response before our systems send it to the bank to ensure the best outcome. The result is usually a 75% average dispute win rate, unlike the industry’s average of ~12%!

Chargeflow has also added additional services like Chargeflow Alerts and Chargeflow Insights to help merchants deal with payment fraud.

Chargeflow Alerts notify you of incoming disputes, so you can preemptively stop them. Chargeflow Insights enables businesses to dive deep into their data and uncover actionable insights. It gives you a 360-degree view of your post-transaction data.

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Comparing Your Blocking Options on Shopify

Blocking Customers on Shopify FAQs

Can you block a customer on Shopify?

Shopify has no native “block customer” button. You can cancel and refund their orders manually, use Shopify Flow to auto-cancel orders matching their email, phone, or address, install a blocking app for IP-level blocks, or use Chargeflow Prevent to automatically stop risky orders before fulfillment.

How do I block someone from ordering on my Shopify store?

Create a Shopify Flow workflow with the “Order created” trigger, add conditions matching the customer’s email, phone number, or shipping address, and set the action to cancel the order automatically. The order is still placed, but it cancels within seconds and the items restock.

Does Shopify still have the Fraud Filter app?

No. Shopify retired the Fraud Filter app on January 31, 2025. Shopify recommends recreating your blocking rules in Shopify Flow, which supports the same email, address, and risk-level conditions plus automatic order cancellation.

How do I stop fraudulent orders on Shopify?

Combine three layers: Shopify’s built-in fraud analysis to flag high-risk orders, Shopify Flow to auto-cancel orders from known bad actors, and a risk-scoring tool like Chargeflow Prevent to catch new fraudsters your blocklist has never seen. Chargeflow Alerts and Automation then prevent and recover the chargebacks that slip through.

Can I block an IP address on Shopify?

Not natively. Shopify doesn’t offer built-in IP blocking, so you need a third-party blocking app for page-level IP blocks. Keep in mind fraudsters switch IPs easily with VPNs, which is why signal-based risk scoring catches more repeat fraud than IP blocks alone.

Final Thoughts

Managing fraud is an increasing concern for eCommerce merchants. The fraud landscape is constantly shifting. Effective fraud mitigation demands proactive measures –and often involves multiple strategies. Shopify Flow can cancel orders from known bad actors, but it acts after checkout and only stops the identities already on your list.

Yet, several Shopify merchants have found great success in pairing Shopify’s built-in tools with Chargeflow’s automated chargeback solution. Chargeflow ensures that no false and fraudulent transaction will come back to hurt your balance sheet. And when scammers do manage to slip through, you can dispute such cases on autopilot. Chargeflow's success-based pricing allows you to pay for only won cases. Here's how to get started.