What 2026 Fraud Trends Mean for Chargeback Management

The Fraud Landscape in 2026: A Portfolio-Level Problem

Chargeback management has always been a downstream discipline. A transaction occurs, a dispute is filed, and the merchant responds. That reactive model made sense when fraud was largely external, committed by bad actors using stolen credentials or compromised cards.

The 2026 data tells a different story.

According to Ravelin’s Global Fraud Trends 2026, a survey of 1,504 fraud and payments professionals across ten countries, 43% of merchants reported an increase in fraudulent behavior from first parties. That means cardholders who made legitimate purchases and then disputed them anyway. Merchants are now evenly split on whether professional criminals or abusive first parties represent the bigger threat to their operations. That is a significant shift, and one with direct consequences for how MSPs need to think about portfolio-level chargeback exposure.

Friendly fraud and first-party fraud are not new terms. But the scale at which they now operate is. When a substantial share of disputes originate from customers rather than criminals, the traditional fraud-prevention model, which is built around blocking unfamiliar behavior, stops being sufficient on its own.

What the Ravelin Report Reveals About Chargeback Trends

Ravelin’s Global Fraud Trends 2026 is worth reading in full for any MSP responsible for managing merchant risk. The report draws on responses from professionals across online retail, travel, digital goods, and online marketplaces, and surfaces several findings that map directly to chargeback management strategy.

Fraudulent chargebacks ranked as the second most financially costly fraud type across surveyed merchants, behind only online payment fraud. Refund abuse climbed to third, overtaking its 2025 position, and merchants now report that refund and returns abuse is becoming one of the more difficult fraud types to quantify and control. Ravelin also found that the average annual fraud loss per enterprise reached $11.4 million in 2026, a 7.5% year-over-year increase, with more than two in five enterprises losing over 1% of annual revenue to fraud and abuse.

On the dispute challenge side, there is some encouraging movement. The report shows that in 2026, 44% of merchants challenged disputes on average, up from 38% the prior year, and success rates when challenging improved from 43% to 62% year over year. Ravelin attributes this in part to stronger evidence practices, more selective representment strategies, and increased focus on dispute control under Visa’s VAMP framework.

For MSPs, that last point matters. Merchants with better tooling and cleaner evidence workflows are winning more disputes. Merchants without them are not. That performance gap is a direct reflection of the quality of chargeback management infrastructure you provide across your portfolio.

Ravelin Global Fraud Trends 2026 Surveying 1,504 fraud and payments professionals across ten countries and four ecommerce sectors, this annual report covers fraud consequences, emerging fraud types, fighting strategies, and future predictions. Key findings include a 7.5% year-over-year rise in average enterprise fraud losses, a significant increase in dispute challenge success rates, and growing concern over first-party fraud and AI-enabled attacks. Read the full report

What the Adyen Report Adds: Intent Over Identity

Where Ravelin focuses on volume and cost, Adyen’s Fraud Report 2026 adds an important layer of analysis around why conventional defenses are struggling to keep up.

The report, which draws on transaction data from approximately $1.6 trillion in processed payment volume alongside a survey of 1,000 US-based enterprise merchant decision-makers, centers on a concept it calls the identity crisis in fraud detection. The core argument is that fraud has shifted from exploiting unauthorized identities to exploiting legitimate ones. First-party fraud, reported by 44.3% of businesses in Adyen’s survey, now operates through verified accounts, recognized devices, and behavior that passes every standard checkpoint. Policy and promotion abuse follows closely, with 39.8% of merchants reporting it as a current challenge.

Adyen’s data also highlights the cost of overcorrection. When businesses tighten fraud controls without precision, legitimate customers suffer. The report cites one sector where a 38% reduction in refund rates produced a 66% increase in chargeback volume. Customers who lost their resolution path defaulted to disputes. That is a direct operational risk for any merchant whose MSP is recommending or implementing blanket fraud controls without a layered dispute management strategy underneath.

The report’s broader argument is that fraud management is increasingly a commercial decision, not just a risk function. Nearly 48% of surveyed businesses now view fraud management as a balance between loss prevention and growth, and 39% describe it primarily as a growth enablement function. For MSPs, that reframing has real implications for how you position chargeback solutions to merchant partners.

Adyen Fraud Report 2026 Drawing on approximately $1.6 trillion in processed payment volume and a survey of 1,000 US-based enterprise merchants, this report examines the shift toward identity-based and first-party fraud, the commercial cost of false declines, and how leading organizations are rethinking fraud management as a growth strategy rather than a pure risk function. Read the full report

First-Party Fraud and the Chargeback Pipeline

Both reports converge on a point that MSPs cannot afford to overlook: a growing share of chargebacks are not the result of criminal fraud. They are the result of consumer behavior, whether that is intentional misuse or the normalized exploitation of merchant policies that Adyen describes in detail.

This matters for chargeback management in a few practical ways.

Representment strategy has to evolve

When a chargeback stems from first-party fraud rather than third-party criminal activity, the evidence required to win that dispute looks different. Usage records, cancellation logs, delivery confirmation tied to the cardholder’s address, and communication history all become more important. Merchants who lack this documentation are exposed regardless of whether the transaction itself was legitimate.

Alert programs become more strategic

Pre-dispute chargeback alerts like Ethoca Alerts and Verifi CDRN are often framed primarily as chargeback prevention mechanisms. But in a first-party fraud environment, the decision to refund on an alert requires more nuance. Refunding a legitimate dispute avoids a chargeback fee and a ratio hit. Refunding a pattern of first-party abuse rewards it. MSPs managing alert workflows at scale need to build that distinction into their decisioning logic.

Transaction data sharing has a compounding benefit

Sharing enriched order data with issuers at the point of inquiry, the function DEFLECT serves through Order Insight and Consumer Clarity, addresses the upstream moment where a first-party fraud attempt often begins. A cardholder who sees full transaction details, including product description, merchant name, and fulfillment status, at the point of inquiry has less cover for a false dispute claim. That early-stage resolution keeps disputes from entering the chargeback pipeline in the first place.

Portfolio Risk and the MSP’s Responsibility

Neither the Ravelin nor Adyen data is particularly forgiving for MSPs who take a hands-off approach to merchant chargeback management.

Ravelin found that 66% of merchants believe their organization should be doing more to combat fraud, and that fewer than 5% feel they are already operating at maximum effectiveness. At the same time, 30% of enterprises still do not use any AI or machine learning as part of their fraud defenses. These are not merchants who are deliberately under-investing. In many cases, they simply lack the infrastructure or guidance to do better.

That gap is where MSP value is created or lost. Merchants who are placed with service providers that offer automated, integrated dispute management workflows are better positioned to sustain chargeback ratios within acceptable bounds, avoid placement in network monitoring programs like VAMP, and recover revenue from disputes they actually have the evidence to win.

Merchants who are not in that position are a liability on your portfolio. And as Ravelin’s data shows, the trend is moving in the wrong direction fast enough that passivity has a measurable cost.

What MSPs Should Take Away From the 2026 Data

The fraud trends identified in both reports are not going to reverse in the near term. Ravelin found that 52% of merchants expect fraud to continue increasing, and 78% predict their spending to combat fraud will rise. Adyen’s data shows that 96.8% of businesses made at least one fraud-related operational tradeoff in the past year, and that the cost of getting those tradeoffs wrong is increasingly measured in lost revenue rather than just prevented loss.

For MSPs, the strategic takeaway is straightforward. Chargeback management infrastructure is no longer a value-add. It is a baseline expectation for merchants who understand what they are up against. The question is whether the infrastructure you provide is sophisticated enough to address a fraud environment that has fundamentally changed.

Pre-dispute alerts need to feed into structured, automated workflows. Representment needs to be evidence-driven and selective. Transaction data sharing needs to operate upstream, before disputes enter the formal process. And the whole system needs to be managed as a coordinated strategy, not a collection of independent tools.

Build a Smarter Chargeback Program for Your Portfolio

If the 2026 fraud data has reinforced anything, it is that reactive chargeback management is an increasingly expensive way to operate. MSPs who want to protect their merchant portfolios and reduce systemic dispute exposure need solutions that work across the entire dispute lifecycle. We can help you evaluate where your current infrastructure has gaps, and build an integrated approach that covers pre-dispute resolution, alert management, and automated representment across your portfolio. Reach out to our team to start the conversation.

Why ChargebackHelp?

ChargebackHelp brings DEFLECT, RESOLVE, and RECOVER together into a single, card-agnostic platform designed for the complexity MSPs manage every day. DEFLECT shares enriched transaction data with issuers and cardholders before disputes escalate. RESOLVE consolidates Verifi CDRN, Ethoca Alerts, Visa RDR, and fraud and dispute notices into a unified alert management workflow. RECOVER automates representment by capturing compelling evidence directly from transaction and fulfillment data. Together, these solutions give MSPs the infrastructure to manage portfolio-wide dispute exposure at scale, reduce chargeback liability, and deliver measurable performance improvements across every merchant they serve.