Chargeback monitoring program
The card networks' schemes that put merchants with too many chargebacks under watch, with fines and, at worst, the loss of the right to accept cards.
The yardstick is the ratio of a month's chargebacks to its transactions. Mastercard's Excessive Chargeback Program has long flagged merchants at 1.5 percent and at least a hundred cases a month, with a harsher tier at three percent. Visa ran separate programmes for disputes and fraud for years. In 2025 they were merged into VAMP, which targets the acquirer rather than the merchant directly.
Fines land on the acquirer, which passes them on with interest. Stay in the programme too long and the merchant agreement goes, possibly with a place on Mastercard's MATCH list, which other acquirers check before signing a new client. Hence merchants pay for services like Ethoca and Verifi, which catch a dispute before it becomes a chargeback, and therefore before it counts.