Is friendly fraud 36% of fraud? Why the statistic misleads

First-party fraud rose from 15% to 36% of reported fraud between 2023 and 2024, largely because payment companies got better at labelling it.

A widely quoted 2026 statistic says first-party fraud rose from 15% of all reported fraud in 2023 to 36% in 2024. First-party fraud, often called friendly fraud, means a customer disputing a purchase they made. Chargeback vendors cite the figure to suggest customers have become far less honest in two years, but most of the increase comes from the industry getting better at labelling these cases.

Visa rolled out Compelling Evidence 3.0 (Visa's rule that lets you use a customer's past orders as proof) in 2023, and Mastercard introduced First-Party Trust the same year. Verifi and Ethoca, alert services that let you refund before a chargeback is filed, added behavior detection to their tools, and the major US payment companies retrained their internal classifiers on data from the new rules. Cases that once landed in a generic fraud category now get a first-party label, and customer behavior did not triple over that period.

Industry estimates and our own observations across thousands of online and phone consumer disputes put first-party misuse at 50% to 70% of those disputes for the better part of a decade. Misuse here means the customer authorized the transaction and then contested it. The share has moved within that range, and the industry can now spot more of it after the fact.

Budgets tend to follow the headline. A merchant who reads "36% and rising" may spend on tools that try to stop these disputes before they become a chargeback. Those tools help with some cases, such as buyers who do not recognize the charge, and a clearer statement descriptor (the name on the customer's card statement) can often fix those cheaply. Most of the money comes back through your reply to the dispute, which is the written response sent to the customer's bank, on the disputes that do arrive.

The reply that reaches the bank decides those cases. It wins when its framing fits how that bank reviews disputes and its evidence matches the dispute reason (the code on your notice). representments.com drafts every reply that way and refines its approach as outcomes come in.