This is not a new thing, it's a pretty standard MO of fraudsters to check if the cards they have purchased/stolen are going to work, i.e. have a value to resell.

New small businesses, particularly those that are potentially having a spike in sales (anything AI right now) are a good target as the operators may not have put into place their own monitoring and mitigation yet, but they have enough volume not to trigger an auto lock from the card processors.

Personally I have found Stripes fraud protection better than the competitors, however this thread has some good points about how some of these payments should have been auto-blocked.