VAMP penalties start 1st October: Ravelin urges merchants to act before Visa chargebacks crackdown

London, September 15 2025. Leading fraud prevention platform Ravelin is urging merchants to take immediate action on Visa’s updated VAMP (Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program). It warns that failure to minimize fraud will mean incurring significant, reoccurring fees, and even losing the ability to accept Visa payments.

Ravelin has published a comprehensive VAMP guide to help businesses save time, money, and avoid disruption.

VAMP enforcement begins on October 1, 2025, from when merchants with high rates of fraud will have to pay new penalties.

VAMP consolidates Visa’s previous dispute and fraud monitoring efforts, for both merchants and acquirers, into a single global framework. It is intended to encourage merchants to manage fraud more closely.

• Under VAMP, merchants who have more than 2.2% of disputed transactions, whether fraudulent or not, will find themselves subject to a fee of $8 per dispute. From April 2026, this threshold will be reduced to 1.5%. For high-volume businesses, these charges could swiftly mount up.

• VAMP also introduces new controls on enumeration attacks, in which criminals test stolen card details by attempting small purchases. Merchants will be subject to VAMP if more than 20% of their transactions are enumeration attacks, irrespective of their value.

Ravelin CEO Martin Sweeney said:

Ravelin recommends merchants take the following steps now:

1. Review their current dispute and fraud rates using Visa’s new calculations. Understand how close the business is to the VAMP and enumeration thresholds.

2. Invest in real-time fraud prevention tools to identify and block fraudulent activity before payments go through

3. Check their acquirer’s policies around chargebacks, as well as any changes planned for VAMP. Consider switching if these are unclear or inflexible.

4. Ask acquirers to send data for all chargebacks – in case there is fraud you haven’t seen before.

5. Consider deploying 3D Secure at merchant level. An in-house 3D Secure solution optimizes authentication data, reduces fraud, and increases opportunities for frictionless, uninterrupted buying journeys.
   

Sweeney continues:

Read Ravelin's Guide to Visa VAMP here.

About Ravelin

Ravelin is an AI-native fraud prevention company building technology which helps 340+ online companies prevent evolving fraud threats and accept more payments with confidence. Combining machine learning, graph networks, behavioral analysis, nuanced consortium data, and expert rules, Ravelin has been empowering merchants for over 10 years to draw deeper insights from their customer data, protect the entire customer journey, detect fraud and abuse, and increase payment acceptance. www.ravelin.com