Suggested Cloaking Scenarios (Defensive Guide)
This section outlines subtle, complex evasion patterns observed in the payment ecosystem.
⚠️ DISCLAIMER:
This content is strictly for educational and defensive purposes. It is designed to help PSP risk teams, underwriters, and detection engineers identify sophisticated cloaking methodologies that often bypass standard automated checks.
Overview
Unlike "Direct" or "Redirect" cloaking which relies on technical obfuscation (hiding the site), these scenarios often rely on Semantic Obfuscation—hiding the nature of the business while operating in plain sight.
The Scenarios
- Soft Brand Mismatch: Legitimate-looking branding that masks a high-risk sub-vertical (e.g., "Streaming Devices" vs "IPTV").
- Platform-Inside-Platform: A compliant "wrapper" service that gates access to a high-risk internal marketplace.
- Semi-Offline Funnel: A hybrid model where the digital funnel transitions to an encrypted chat for the final sale.
- Reseller Aggregation: A single merchant acting as a payment front for multiple unauthorized shadow merchants.
🛡️ Detection Philosophy
To catch these patterns, detection must move beyond Snapshot Analysis (looking at the website once) to Behavioral Forensics (analyzing how money and users move over time).
| Detection Layer | Traditional Focus | Advanced Defense |
|---|---|---|
| Onboarding | Website Crawl, MCC Check | Semantic Analysis of Product Descriptions |
| Transaction | Velocity, AVS Checks | Invoice Line Item NLP, Invoice-to-Traffic Ratios |
| Post-Processing | Chargeback Rates | Dispute Text Mining, Feature Usage Telemetry |
🧠 Defense Engineering
Each scenario includes a "Recommended Detection Strategies" section with pseudocode (SQL/TypeScript) to help engineering teams build better alerts.