2026 Chargeback Field Report: What Disputes Actually Look Like Now

Chargebacks911’s annual field report is based on a survey of 250+ merchants and covers 2025–2026 with year-over-year comparison. For high-risk PSPs, the useful part is not the headlines; it is the operating data that shows where fraud teams, acquirers, and merchants are missing the real source of disputes.

1. Friendly fraud keeps getting bigger. 83.4% of large merchants said they have seen growth over the last three years, and 74.4% now treat it as a moderate or severe threat, up 4 percentage points from last year. Merchants estimate that friendly fraud makes up 43.8% of all disputes, while Chargebacks911’s internal data puts the figure at 86%. That gap is the point: most merchants are not seeing where their chargebacks are actually coming from.
2. For gambling and betting, the mechanics are familiar. A player deposits, loses, and then disputes the transaction as “unauthorized.” Without a full digital trail — session logs, IP, fingerprint, behavioral data — rebutting that claim is close to impossible. This is exactly the kind of case where the dispute is not really about the transaction, but about the merchant’s ability to prove it happened as intended.
3. The win rate that matters is not the first-cycle rate. The average first cycle is 44.6% in the merchant’s favor, which sounds acceptable on paper. In practice, once second-cycle disputes and cases that are never challenged are included, the real amount of funds actually recovered is 10.7%. More than half of merchants handling disputes in-house said their losses increased on the second cycle.
4. Visa’s VAMP (Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program) is already affecting merchants. 21% of merchants said the new monitoring program directly hit their business, and another 33% said they do not know whether they are in scope. The threshold for the acquirer is 0.7%, not 1.5%, which many merchants still treat as the relevant line. For high-risk operators, that gap is where the surprise calls from the acquiring bank usually start.
5. Chargebacks are getting smaller, and that changes monitoring logic. Historically, the average dispute was 20–30% higher than the average transaction; now the picture is reversed, with disputes at $94 versus transactions at $100. In gambling, that means players are disputing individual sessions and small deposits instead of large top-ups. Filters built around high-ticket fraud simply do not catch that pattern.

There is also the commercial part of the story. 38% of merchants said chargebacks materially affect their economics, and banks usually respond in a very predictable order: higher fees, larger rolling reserves, tighter requirements, or account closure. For high-risk merchants, that pressure shows up at the checkout too — higher deposit fees, fewer payment methods, and lower limits, because somebody has to absorb the cost of the risk.