Guide · 4 min
The most common reason someone who assumed they were too late turns out not to be.
Two different dates
Most people assume a dispute window runs from the day the money left. For some categories it does. For others it runs from the day you discovered the problem, because you could not have known sooner.
If what you paid for was misrepresented, the clock on noticing cannot start before you noticed.
Why we ask you for both dates
The free check asks when the last payment happened and when you realized something was wrong. If the second is recent, a case that looks long dead on the first date can still be open. The scoring model gives it points accordingly, in full on the scoring page.
The honest limits
The specifics vary by card network, by issuing bank, and by which category the dispute is filed under. There are outer limits that apply no matter when you found out. We do not publish a table of days: a number wrong for your bank is worse than none.
The useful move is one question to your card issuer, in writing: “For a dispute where I only discovered the problem recently, does the time limit run from the transaction date or from the discovery date?” Their answer is authoritative for you in a way that no website’s is.
What counts as discovering
Not the moment you started to worry. The moment you had a specific reason: a message, an admission, someone else’s identical conversation. A date you can point at is a date you can use.
Which is also why saving the conversation matters more than almost anything else. The evidence of when you found out is usually inside it.