Guide · 6 min
Nobody explains this to the person filing, so most complaints arrive in a shape nobody can act on.
Who actually reads it
Not a judge. A dispute analyst, working through a queue with a few minutes per case. They are not deciding whether you were wronged — only whether your file fits a category their rules recognize.
“They lied to me and took my money” is true, and it gives them nothing to file it under. Dates, amounts, and a named category do.
What a chargeback is, in one paragraph
Card money moves through your bank, a card network and the merchant’s bank. A dispute pulls it back along that chain: your bank raises it, the merchant may contest, the rules decide. You are not suing anyone; you are asking a payment system to apply its own rulebook.
The categories
Every dispute is filed under a reason code — fraud, services not provided, misrepresentation, and so on. Codes differ between networks and change, so we do not publish a list to memorize. What matters: the code determines what evidence is relevant and what the other side must prove.
This is where most self-filed disputes fail. The story is true, the code is wrong, and the evidence attached answers a question nobody asked.
What makes one move
Dates and amounts that match the statement exactly, filed under a category the evidence supports. Evidence you can show has not been edited since you sent it. A written reply from the platform, if you have one — the merchant’s own words outweigh yours.
What kills one on arrival
- A long narrative with no dates.
- Screenshots without visible timestamps.
- Amounts that do not reconcile with the statement.
- Disputing the whole relationship rather than specific transactions.
- Claiming you never authorized payments you plainly did — easy to disprove, and it damages the rest.
What we will not tell you
What the outcome will be. It depends on facts only you hold and a decision that is not ours to make. Anyone confident about it from the outside is guessing.
We name the pattern, show the codes that fit, assemble the evidence, and leave the filing to you. Before any of that, read what can go wrong. A dispute is not free — it can cost you the account, and with some banks a fee.