You could be paying for other people’s fraud<\/p>\n
A new industry report shows merchants are increasingly passing charge-back and fraud costs to customers. A growing share of those costs comes from shoppers disputing purchases they actually made.<\/p>\n
Roughly 38% of merchants now pass the cost of charge-backs and fraud directly to customers through higher prices, up from 32.5% a year earlier, according to the 2026 Chargeback Field Report<\/a> published by the fraud-management firm Chargebacks911<\/a>.<\/p>\n The report was written for merchants. But read from the other side of the counter, its data describes something else: a quiet transfer of fraud costs onto ordinary shoppers, including the ones who never dispute a charge.<\/p>\n Most of it isn’t stolen cards<\/p>\n The bigger surprise is what’s driving the cost.<\/p>\n The report cites Visa data showing that “friendly fraud” (valid purchases that customers later dispute anyway, by mistake or on purpose) makes up about 75% of the charge-backs they receive. Friendly fraud isn’t a thief overseas. It’s a customer who bought something, received it, then told the bank the charge wasn’t authorized.<\/p>\n The report attributes the rise to a growing “charge-back culture,” in which disputing a charge has become almost effortless. Cardholders can now reverse a transaction with a single tap, often more easily than they completed the purchase, and online forums walk them through how.<\/p>\n Outside research points in the same direction. The identity-verification firm Socure has estimated that friendly fraud and first-party fraud cost businesses about $100 billion a year<\/a>, with $89 billion of that borne by merchants. In a Socure survey, 35% of Americans admitted to committing first-party fraud, and 40% said they knew someone who had.<\/p>\n Not every dispute is dishonest. Under the Fair Credit Billing Act<\/a>, a shopper can formally request clarification and documentation for a charge they don’t recognize. This provision turns an unrecognized charge into a disputable one, even when the purchase was real. But the merchant still loses, and the loss has to go somewhere.<\/p>\n A cost that multiplies<\/p>\n The face value of a disputed charge understates what it costs.<\/p>\n Every $1 lost to fraud ends up costing North American e-commerce merchants as much as $4.61 once charge-back fees, staff time, prevention software and lost merchandise are counted, the report says, citing data from LexisNexis Risk Solutions. By that math, a $50 disputed order becomes closer to a $230 loss.<\/p>\n That multiplier is the reason prices move. A cost running nearly five times the sticker value is hard to absorb quietly, and the report says fighting back rarely pays. Merchants recover revenue on only about 1 in 5 of the friendly-fraud disputes they contest, once second-round disputes and the cases they don’t fight are included.<\/p>\n For small sellers, the math is unforgiving. A Stripe user who sells specialty products recently described being hit twice by the same buyer<\/a> who kept the goods, won both disputes and then emailed to gloat. Payment processors operate within card-network rules where the issuing bank decides disputes, Jarrod Wright of Chargebacks911 explained in that case, and pursuing an individual through the courts is “expensive, slow, and varies by jurisdiction.”<\/p>\n What it means for shoppers<\/p>\n Fraud is not the main reason retail prices rise; inflation and supplier costs weigh more. But the report makes the case that a real and growing slice of what merchants charge is now built to cover disputes, the dishonest ones included.<\/p>\n The broader pattern holds up against independent research. A system built to protect consumers from fraud is increasingly being used to commit it, and the people unknowingly covering the difference are the shoppers who never filed a dispute at all.<\/p>\n This story<\/a> was produced by Chargebacks911<\/a> and reviewed and distributed by Stacker<\/a>.<\/p>\n Copyright 2026 Stacker Media, LLC<\/p>\n This story was originally published June 25, 2026 at 7:30 AM.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You could be paying for other people’s fraud A new industry report shows merchants are increasingly passing charge-back…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":319537,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[202,204,203,199,201,200],"class_list":["post-319536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=319536"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319536\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/319537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=319536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=319536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=319536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}