I live in Kazakhstan (I assume that's one country nobody heard of and would disable in their dashboard) and my bank doesn't even have any UI for chargebacks, nor I ever heard about anyone doing chargebacks. They even explicitly warn me sometimes that I assume all responsibility for that payment. I guess I can go through some process, it's VISA after all, but it's definitely not something I can do easily.
Yeah it's not a thing available to customers outside of western countries. Even in eastern europe countries a chargeback means making a lengthy complaint with the bank and if they decide to trust you then they make chargeback.
So nobody really knows about it.
When i started selling digital download content. Some people will buy, download and instantly charge back.
wait, people can just do that? How does that even work? Does Visa not supposedly protect both the seller and the buyer?
In Western Europe, a chargeback is not that unheard of, but it still requires you to make your case and follow a procedure and review. It's not that lengthy or difficult, but you cant just buy something online and then do a chargeback, unless you can clearly show that the download is not working and tried the helpdesk or you were mislead or something
It’s supposed to be the same in the US, but due to heavy automation on both sides, the “evidence” presented on either side is essentially pages of rasterized TIFF slop propping up a handful of bits of ground truth data.
I suspect most decisions are now made based on ambient factors such as “does this customer file above average chargebacks; if not, believe whatever they entered in our multiple choice questionnaire” or “if we have any undisputed payment on the same card by the same account, push back, otherwise eat the loss”. Part of this is even getting codified by newer network dispute evidence rules as well.
Since nobody ever seems to hold cardholders accountable for misrepresentation, and since it’s psychologically much easier to lie on a whimsical multiple choice form you fill on your bank app when bored on the bathroom than to sign a printed document containing a short summary of the legal consequences of willful deception, the situation is what it is.
Sometimes, whether a society is actually “high trust” depends on the transaction amount, and whether that amount warrants legal expenses on either side.
I have been using online payments for over 15 years now. Over these years I probably have had accounts with over 10 different banks. Not a single time have I seen any setting related to chargebacks. In fact, I learnt of these just a few years back and I had to google it what do these even mean. Im from India btw.
And let me tell you, nowhere in my circle that I know of have ever raised one single chargeback in these 15 years. Not one.
This seems more of a developed-countries thing to me.
The strongest signal is whether they use an eBank/app that has a one-click button to report transactions as fraudulent. The Apple card(?) seems especially prevalent.
I had a friend with the apple card, and there were fraudulent charges on her card before she even used it.
I think that caused her to over-scrutinize things.
But (years) later I saw her using apple pay. She had charges she didn't recognize and would immediately flag them. Thing is, I couldn't help but think they might have been real charges with weirdly named companies on the transaction.
It’s 2026, why can’t credit card and merchant figure out a way to transmit order summary URL as part of credit card transactions so I don’t need to match up transactions by amount??
A similar thing as what you propose already exists in the Nordics. You pay with your card as normal, and the receipt gets logged automatically in the app.
It's not really helpful if I recognize the name when the gas station doesn't put the charges on my card until Friday when I bought stuff there on Tuesday. Then I'm just confused and have to analyze my whole purchase history.
it's common, they reserve an amount, and then update towards the final payment. These are not payments as such, and almost always take 48 hours to clear. Same at hotel rooms usually etc..
Many banks only show payments (so only after cleared) and not reserved funds. They will just show that you don't have the full credit available
> She had charges she didn't recognize and would immediately flag them. Thing is, I couldn't help but think they might have been real charges with weirdly named companies on the transaction.
That's completely the companies fault. If you give a transaction a reference that the customer will not recognise, that's on you!
U.S. chargeback rules are different. In other countries, you cannot repudiate credit card transactions that you authorized (and this applies to Mastercard/Visa, too). You need to do something else if you end up in a dispute with the merchant.
You open a ticket where you describe what happened and attach everything you have. It happened to me twice over the years, both with Visa, and I had them both approved. I'm not sure that in the age of AI agents they would care anymore, but I can dream right.
The cardholder’s contractual relationship is always with the card issuer, which is usually a bank or some other financial institution. This is no different in the US. If something on your bill seems off, you contact the one that issued it, i.e. your bank.
Hmm nevertheless my cases were handled by Viseca, not by my issuing bank. I don't know why, is it because of my bank, or my country, but yeah it seems to be different.
That’s completely false. Visa/Mastercard chargeback rules are fairly uniform globally, and disputes are possible in many (if not all) non-US countries as well.
Whether your bank knows how to use them well to represent your interests is a different matter. For example, I’ve seen banks decline chargebacks against bankrupt merchants in certain countries because they were poorly advised about the legal ramifications, and other banks in the same country win the exact same kind of dispute. Lacking sufficient reading comprehension to parse the dispute rules (it’s a long PDF!) also seems common.
not to mention, thats pretty bad advice for these chargeback frauds. not gonna deny some regions have higher risk of frauds, but these are mostly high-volume automated schemes.
in the case of these "friendly fraud" schemes, they are much more likely to come from more developed regions with strong consumer protection laws like the NA.
if anything in many of those "high risk" regions, chargeback are much less common because fewer consumer protection law e.g. banks would automatically reject chargebacks for transactions with 3DS OTP.
Yeah, they will likely be spoofing their location anyway with residential IPs to let their payments go through easier and maintain identity separation.