Chargeback management for cross-border merchants

A chargeback costs more than the order. The merchant loses the goods or service, the payment, a dispute fee and staff time, and every dispute moves it closer to a card scheme monitoring program. For a merchant selling across borders, the risk is higher on every count: customers see unfamiliar names on their statements, deliveries take longer, refunds cross currencies, and fraudsters prefer cards they can use far from home.

This article explains how a dispute moves through the system, the Visa and Mastercard thresholds that matter, how to prevent the disputes that evidence rarely wins, how to fight the ones you can, and what changes for cross-border merchants. It is written for payment and risk teams at merchants selling across borders, including into markets such as CIS, MENA, LATAM, Turkey and Africa.

How does a chargeback work?

A cardholder contests a payment with their bank, the issuer. The issuer takes the money back through the card scheme, and the acquirer debits it from the merchant along with a fee. The merchant can accept the dispute or respond with evidence, and the issuer decides.

The timings are long. Stripe’s documentation says card networks typically allow cardholders to dispute within 120 days of the payment, longer in some cases, such as goods or services delivered after the payment date. Once a chargeback is created, the merchant usually has 7 to 21 days to respond, depending on the network. The issuer then usually takes 60 to 75 days to decide, and the whole cycle can take 2 to 3 months.

Before the dispute, there may be warnings. Issuers report suspected fraud to the schemes (Visa’s TC40 reports and Mastercard’s SAFE reports), and some providers pass these on as early fraud warnings. According to Stripe, about 40% of Visa and Mastercard early fraud warnings become fraud disputes if the payment is not refunded.

Which monitoring thresholds matter?

Both schemes measure a monthly ratio and place merchants that exceed it into a program with fines and remediation plans.

Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP). Since 1 June 2025, Visa counts card-not-present fraud reports (TC40) plus disputes (TC15) and divides them by settled transactions. Disputes resolved through pre-dispute services and fraud that qualifies for Compelling Evidence 3.0 are excluded. The excessive merchant thresholds in Visa’s fact sheet are:

Visa region	VAMP ratio	Monthly count of fraud and disputes
CEMEA (Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa)	2.2% or more	150 or more, and at least USD 75,000
LAC (Latin America and the Caribbean)	1.5% or more	1,500 or more
AP, Canada, EU, US	1.5% or more from 1 April 2026 (2.2% before)	1,500 or more

Visa’s fact sheet notes that programs for Brazil and Chile will be announced separately. The CEMEA count trigger is ten times lower than elsewhere, which matters for a mid-sized merchant selling into the Gulf, the Caucasus or Central Asia.

Mastercard Excessive Chargeback Program. Stripe’s summary gives two levels: Excessive Chargeback Merchant at 100 to 299 chargebacks and a rate of 1.5% to 2.99%, and High Excessive at 300 or more and 3%. The rate divides this month’s chargebacks by last month’s transactions, and fines begin in the second month. Mastercard counts a chargeback regardless of refund, liability shift or outcome.

Note one detail that cross-border merchants miss: Visa identifies accounts by statement descriptor and acquirer, so the same business can be several monitored accounts in Visa’s eyes, one per descriptor and acquiring country.

How do you prevent disputes in the first place?

Most disputes start with a customer who does not recognise a charge, cannot get a refund, or never received the order. Prevention targets those causes:

1. Recognisable descriptors. Use a soft descriptor that matches the brand the customer bought from, in Latin characters, with a support contact where the scheme allows it.
2. Fast, visible refunds. A refund issued before the customer calls the bank prevents the dispute. A refund that takes three weeks to cross currencies invites one.
3. Clear billing for subscriptions. Stripe’s guidance lists reminders before renewals, an easy cancellation path and explicit agreement to billing terms.
4. Delivery communication. Shipping times stated before checkout, delays communicated quickly, tracking sent with every shipment.
5. Authentication where it pays. 3-D Secure moves liability for many fraud disputes to the issuer, although the dispute may still count.
6. Reversal instead of refund. Stripe notes that a refund processed as a reversal, usually within about 2 hours of capture, is the only kind that can prevent a fraud report.
7. Pre-dispute alerts. Services such as Ethoca and Verifi alert merchants when a dispute is about to be raised, so they can refund instead.

How do you win the disputes worth fighting?

Pick them. Disputes over undelivered goods with tracking, digital goods with usage records, and friendly fraud from returning customers are often winnable. Disputes where the customer genuinely did not get what they paid for are not, and fighting them only adds fees.

For friendly fraud on Visa, Compelling Evidence 3.0 changes the odds. It applies to fraud disputes with reason code 10.4. The merchant needs at least two earlier undisputed payments on the same card, made more than 120 and no more than 365 days before the disputed one, that match it on two main data elements (purchase IP address, device fingerprint or device ID) or one main and one secondary element (shipping address, email address, customer account ID). That means storing those fields for every payment now, not looking for them when the dispute arrives.

What is different for cross-border merchants?

• Higher fraud pressure on foreign cards. Fraud reports count towards VAMP even when you win the dispute later.
• Currency movement. Stripe’s example shows a disputed amount can differ from the original payment because the exchange rate has moved between purchase and dispute.
• Local dispute rules. Stripe’s documentation notes that domestic Mexican card disputes start with an inquiry phase, and that disputes on Nigerian payment methods cannot be challenged because of local regulation.
• Methods without card chargebacks. Instant bank transfers and cash vouchers usually have no scheme dispute process; wallets and BNPL providers run their own, often with longer windows.
• Several descriptors and acquirers. Each combination can be monitored separately, which can help or hurt depending on where the disputes fall.

What should you track every month?

The schemes count by month, so your own reporting should too, and it should split the numbers the way the schemes do:

Metric	Split by	Why
Disputes received	Scheme, descriptor, acquirer, reason code	Matches how Visa and Mastercard identify accounts
Fraud reports or early fraud warnings	Scheme, descriptor, card country	Count towards VAMP even when no dispute follows
Settled card-not-present transactions	Scheme, descriptor, acquirer	The denominator of the ratio
Refunds issued after a fraud warning	Days since payment	Shows whether fast refunds are working
Disputes won and lost	Reason code, evidence type	Shows which disputes are worth fighting

Remember that Visa uses the same month’s settled transactions while Mastercard divides this month’s chargebacks by last month’s transactions, according to Stripe’s summary. A month of unusually low sales therefore inflates the following month’s Mastercard ratio, even if disputes stay flat.

Worked example: when does a CEMEA merchant enter VAMP?

Example figures, for illustration only.

A merchant settles 9,000 Visa card-not-present payments a month in CEMEA, averaging USD 120. In one month it receives 95 disputes and 70 fraud reports, 165 in total, worth USD 19,800.

Check	Value	Threshold	Over?
VAMP ratio	165 ÷ 9,000 = 1.83%	2.2%	No
Count	165	150	Yes
Amount	USD 19,800	USD 75,000	No

The merchant is under the excessive threshold, but it is already past the count trigger and close to the ratio. A fraud attack that adds 40 reports would push the ratio to 2.28%. Cutting fraud reports, not only disputes, is what keeps it out.

How does Omno help manage chargebacks?

Omno does not decide disputes; issuers and schemes do. What it provides is control over what gets processed and where: card blocking stops cards that should not be charged, routing and PSP-eligibility rules decide which provider receives each segment, and customer groups and verification levels can limit what new customers may do. Reporting and the routing-decision log show approvals, declines and providers per segment, and webhooks deliver status changes in one format. The risk controls page covers the settings.