your IP to the billing address or you're dead." I'm starting to think that's outdated and the real killers are issuer-side fraud scoring and BIN velocity, not geo.

My last three successes had loose geo matching — IP was in the right country but wrong city, still cleared. Meanwhile some perfectly geo-matched runs died on the card side.

So which is it? Is geo matching still the dominant factor, or has issuer scoring moved past it and we're all just repeating advice that's 4 years old?