Comment +- 500 miles is accurate enough (Score 1) 130
If you're underground or deep in a building, you're probably on wifi (or plugged in). That means we can geoip to within a 20 or 30 miles at worst, within a block in the best case (company IPs). That's far more accurate than we need to,know whether the acount holder COULD be there. What we're looking for is a transaction in southern California, folllowed 30 minutes later by one in South Carolina, then one in Mexico an hour later. We're computing whether it's possible for the account holder to travel that fast.
We then combine that other data points to score the likelihood of fraud. If it's card-present (swiped) that's lower risk than an internet transaction where they only have the card NUMBER, for example.