Since 1 April, Visa’s VAMP excessive threshold sits at 1.5%, and every dispute past the line now costs $8 with no grace period. For a high-risk merchant running card-not-present volume, that ratio is the number that decides whether your acquirer keeps underwriting you.
The uncomfortable part: VAMP counts fraud reports and disputes in the same bucket. So friendly fraud, a customer disputing a charge they actually made, lands right next to real fraud. For most merchants, that is where the ratio comes from.
There is one Visa rule that pulls qualifying fraud disputes back out of the count: Compelling Evidence 3.0. Used in time, it is the difference between standard and excessive. Used late, it does nothing.
VAMP counts your friendly fraud as fraud
The ratio is simple and unforgiving. Fraud reports (TC40) plus all disputes (TC15), divided by settled transactions (TC05). Non-fraud disputes feed the numerator exactly like confirmed fraud does. A chargeback you would eventually win still counts while it is open, and even issuer-side fraud you never pay for still counts toward the metric.
Only the CEMEA region keeps the older 2.2% line. Everywhere else, the standardised 1.5% is now the bar you clear or explain to your acquirer. Mastercard runs its own monitoring regime on a separate count, so most high-risk merchants are managing two ratios at once.
The fee stacks fast. Every item over the threshold is $8, so a merchant sitting at excessive on a few thousand disputes a month is writing a five-figure penalty cheque before you count the lost sales behind those disputes. That is the pressure the ratio is designed to create, and it is why the disputes you can legitimately remove are worth chasing.
VAMP does not care whether the dispute was fair. It only cares whether it cleared your ratio in time.
CE3.0 removes qualifying disputes from the count
Compelling Evidence 3.0, live since April 2023, applies to one thing: Visa reason code 10.4, card-absent fraud. If you can show a genuine purchase history with the cardholder, Visa reverses the chargeback and the item drops out of your VAMP ratio. It is rule-based, not a judgment call. Meet the criteria and the reversal is essentially guaranteed.
You can fire it at two stages. Before a dispute, when Verifi’s Order Insight surfaces the cardholder inquiry, or after one is filed, by looking the chargeback up in Visa Resolve Online. Earlier is better. A pre-dispute win never becomes a formal dispute in the first place, so it never touches the ratio at all.
| Requirement | What Visa demands |
|---|---|
| Dispute type | Reason code 10.4, card-absent fraud only |
| Prior transactions | Two, paid, undisputed, not validation charges |
| Age of those transactions | 120 to 364 days before the disputed one |
| Matching data points | Two or more of User ID, IP, shipping address, Device ID (one must be IP or Device ID) |
Source: Visa, Compelling Evidence 3.0 Merchant Readiness
The timing trap that erases the benefit
Warning
Same month, or it still counts. For a resolved item to drop out of VAMP, the dispute and its resolution have to land in the same calendar month. Win it a month late and the chargeback reverses, but it already counted against your ratio for the month it hit. That is why serious merchants pair CE3.0 with pre-dispute tools like Order Insight and RDR, which answer the claim before a dispute is ever filed.
So three moves for the next quarter. Turn on pre-dispute (Order Insight, RDR) so fraud claims get resolved before they become disputes. Automate your CE3.0 evidence so qualifying items are represented inside the month, not after. And read the ratio weekly, not monthly, because at $8 a hit with no grace period the bill compounds fast. The threshold dropped. The tools to stay under it did not.
- Forter, “Visa’s Updated VAMP Program,” forter.com, 2026.
- Merchant Risk Council, “Stricter VAMP Ratio Thresholds Are Now in Effect,” merchantriskcouncil.org, 2026.
- Visa, “Compelling Evidence 3.0 Merchant Readiness,” usa.visa.com, March 2023.
- Checkout.com, “Visa Compelling Evidence 3.0: New rules explained,” checkout.com.
