MAG Insights

Earlier this year we launched a new Community of Practice (COP) focused on fraud. Now you may ask yourself, what does that mean? Fraud encompasses many variables and aspects of the payments industry, so our first step was answering this very question. In March, we sent a survey to our merchant members soliciting feedback on exactly what they wanted this COP to focus on. The overwhelming consensus identified compelling evidence and friendly fraud chargeback mitigation programs as the top priorities.

The COP meets regularly to better understand the existing rules for using compelling evidence and how those rules are used to represent, or adjudicate, a chargeback. At least three of the four major card brands publish their chargeback rules. Over the past several months, COP members joined the Fraud COP office hours to review these rules in detail and create a list of questions specific to each card brand’s published rules. Several COP members also shared qualitative insights on how these rules are applied to the real-world chargeback cases they’ve received. We held a Q&A session with one card brand addressing the answers to those questions. We are working with the other card brands to schedule similar Q&A sessions in early 2025. We will use this information to create an educational resource in the coming year.

In addition to compelling evidence, several other fraud-related topics ranked high in our member survey including, account take-over (ATO) fraud, refund fraud, and customer onboarding/acquisition fraud prevention. We will refocus our attention on these topics once we have  completed our work on compelling evidence.

If you’re interested in getting involved with our Fraud COP, you can sign up by submitting the “Join a Community of Practice” form on our website or reach out to Kelly Andrus directly.