Most cardholders disputing their own purchases are picking the faster refund.
"Friendly fraud" is the industry's term for a customer who disputes a transaction they made themselves. The label has lasted because it is convenient, but it puts the problem in the wrong place: not on the customer, but on the bank's refund path being faster, cheaper, and less conditional than the merchant's. Customers, like anyone else with a choice between two queues, take the shorter one.
A typical merchant refund involves finding a contact link, writing an email, waiting for a response, and accepting conditions: restocking fees, return shipping, time windows, "final sale" carve-outs. A chargeback is 3 taps in an app the customer already uses, no questions asked, money back within days. From the customer's seat, the choice is between the slow refund and the fast one.
Building a self-service refund flow on the order page, with a 24-hour turnaround and conditions disclosed up front rather than at the point of request, removes most of the volume because the customer no longer has a reason to pick the bank's path. The cases that remain, where a customer has refunded and then disputed anyway, are worth fighting; the records to argue them are usually already on file.