Payments & Fraud · Reference
Payments Fraud & Chargeback Glossary
The terms that decide whether a subscription app keeps its merchant account — defined plainly, with the current thresholds, and linked to the deep guide for each. If you're staring at a notice from your processor, start here.
Card-network monitoring programs
- Mastercard ECM — Excessive Chargeback Merchant 100–299 CBs + 1.5–2.99%
- The first tier of Mastercard's ECP, triggered at 100–299 chargebacks AND a 1.5%–2.99% chargeback rate in a month — calculated against the preceding month's transaction count. Fines escalate monthly ($1,000 in months 2–3, up to $100,000 by month 19+), with account termination and MATCH listing if unresolved. How to exit ECM →
- Mastercard ECP — Excessive Chargeback Program program
- Mastercard's chargeback monitoring program as a whole — ECP is the program name, not a tier. Its two tiers are ECM (100–299 chargebacks and 1.5%–2.99%) and HECM (300+ and 3.0%+). Threshold reference →
- Mastercard HECM — High Excessive Chargeback Merchant 300+ CBs + 3.0%
- The severe tier of Mastercard's ECP, triggered at 300 or more chargebacks AND a 3.0%+ chargeback rate in a month. Fines escalate faster than ECM — $100,000/month at months 12–18 and $200,000/month from month 19.
- Issuer Recovery Assessment $5 / CB over 300
- A Mastercard ECP assessment of USD 5 per chargeback above 300 in a month, applied from the fourth month in the program onward — in both ECM and HECM.
- Visa VAMP — Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program ≥ 1.5% Excessive
- Visa's consolidated monitoring program (effective 2025) that replaced the legacy VDMP and VFMP with a single combined fraud-and-dispute ratio. Merchants have one tier — Excessive, at ≥ 1.5% since April 1, 2026 (CEMEA stays at 2.2%) — and the ratio only applies at 1,500+ combined fraud and dispute transactions per month. Acquirer-level thresholds (0.5% Above Standard / 0.7% Excessive) are separate. VAMP explained →
- VDMP — Visa Dispute Monitoring Program retired 2025
- Visa's former dispute-ratio program, retired March 31, 2025 and folded into VAMP. You'll still see the acronym (and its legacy 0.9% Standard tier) in older processor documentation. How VAMP replaced it →
- VFMP — Visa Fraud Monitoring Program retired 2025
- Visa's former fraud-ratio program, retired March 31, 2025 and consolidated into VAMP's combined ratio. VAMP guide →
- MATCH list — Member Alert to Control High-risk Merchants ~5 years
- Mastercard's database of terminated merchants. A listing is typically visible to acquirers for five years and makes obtaining a new merchant account extremely difficult — it's the outcome every remediation program is built to avoid. The full program landscape →
Core concepts
- Chargeback ratio
- A merchant's chargebacks divided by transactions in a period, measured per card network, per calendar month. It's the number every monitoring program watches — and Visa and Mastercard count it differently, which is why you track both. Model your live ratios →
- Friendly fraud (first-party fraud)
- A chargeback where a legitimate cardholder disputes a charge they actually authorized — classically, forgetting a subscription and disputing the renewal instead of cancelling. No fraud-scoring model catches it, because the original transaction was genuine; you fix it with billing clarity and dispute interception, not stricter rules. Friendly fraud, in depth →
- Chargeback vs. refund
- A refund is initiated by the merchant; a chargeback is initiated by the cardholder's bank and counts against your ratio. The whole point of dispute interception is to convert a would-be chargeback into a refund before it posts.
- Representment
- Contesting a chargeback by submitting compelling evidence to the issuer to recover the funds. Effective for genuine fraud or service disputes; rarely worth it for clear-cut friendly fraud.
- Acquirer vs. issuer
- The acquirer is your bank/processor — accountable to the networks for your chargeback performance and the one who offboards you if it stays high. The issuer is the cardholder's bank, which decides disputes and can take on liability when 3DS is used.
Tools & controls
- Dispute interception (Ethoca, Verifi / RDR)
- Pre-chargeback alert networks that notify you of a dispute before it becomes a formal chargeback, so you can refund proactively and keep it off your ratio. Most subscription apps approaching VAMP or ECM need both networks, not one. Ethoca vs. Verifi →
- Stripe Radar
- Stripe's built-in fraud tool combining ML risk scoring with merchant-authored rules to allow, review, or block payments. Its defaults are tuned for general e-commerce, not subscription apps — which is where most calibration work lives. Rules that actually reduce chargebacks →
- 3-D Secure (3DS)
- An authentication step (often a one-time passcode) that verifies the cardholder and can shift fraud-chargeback liability to the issuer. Used as dynamic, risk-based gating rather than on every transaction, to avoid crushing conversion.
Staring at an ECM or VAMP notice?
I've taken a subscription app from a 13% chargeback rate to under 1% and out of Mastercard ECM. If you're approaching a threshold, let's talk before the fines escalate.
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Payments Fraud Glossary: ECM, VAMP & MATCH Explained for Subscription Apps
A payment-processor notice full of acronyms — ECM, VAMP, MATCH — decides whether your subscription app keeps taking card payments. This operator-grade glossa...About this video
A payment-processor notice full of acronyms — ECM, VAMP, MATCH — decides whether your subscription app keeps taking card payments. This operator-grade glossary defines the chargeback-compliance terms that actually matter, with the current thresholds and what each one means for you. Built so a panic-inducing notice becomes a simple checklist.