Bypassing the Bank by Leveraging the Merchant

The Basis for the Dispute

I.G. is a middle-aged citizen of the United Kingdom who resides in Saudi Arabia. In early 2020 he was persuaded to invest a considerable amount of his money in an online investment scheme. Unfortunately, the merchant he was doing business with turned out to be an unethical and unregulated online brokerage.

Within six months I.G. had sent his broker around $36,000 from four different credit and debit cards issued by his two UK-based banks. The broker used all manner of psychological tricks to encourage more and more deposits while discouraging withdrawals. Among these were certain written promises that we would eventually use against them. At the time, however, MyChargeBack was not yet in the picture, so I.G. had no way of understanding the legal significance of what was happening to him.

In the end, finding all his requests to withdraw money rebuffed, I.G. finally contacted MyChargeBack for help with getting his money back.

Strategies and Tactics

As always, our first step after taking on a new client was to gather all possible relevant evidence. Accomplishing this task meant involved coaching I.G. to find and send us his bank and credit card statements, as well as showing him how to find and create necessary screenshots of his communication with the merchant, and of critical pages of his online trading account. We reviewed everything scrupulously, since burying the bank in paper causes aggravation, a lack of trust and yields poor results. In addition to all the above, we also conducted significant independent research into the merchant to better understand his unethical business model.

Having a massive quantity of documentation in hand, our original intention was to distil it all into something sufficiently concise and clear for our client’s bank to understand without being too long. It is a testament to our experience in developing best practices with hundreds of banks that we know what to keep and what to discard to present the best possible case. 

While reviewing the documentation the client sent us, however, we discovered a few seemingly innocuous statements among the merchant’s communications with him. In order to ease his mind and delay more substantial withdrawal requests, the merchant sent him written assurances that were phrased using language that we knew to be in direct violation of Visa’s core rules. That being the case, we switched gears and charted a different strategy for pursuing the case.

Therefore, before sending the documentation to the bank, we first instructed our client to send it to the merchant. The client was instructed to tell the merchant unambiguously that if he did not receive a full refund immediately, he would then proceed by submitting a chargeback request with his bank.

After weeks of avoiding and ignoring our client, the merchant quickly contacted him and scheduled a call right away to negotiate. We coached our client ahead of the call not to commit to anything, but simply listen instead, demand all offers in writing, and to say that he would require time to consider it.

After speaking, our client received an email of their less than complete offer. We wrote a reply for him to send demanding a full and immediate refund. The merchant had no choice but to comply. If he did not, it was obvious that he would face significant penalties from Visa, and potentially his own bank as well.

Nevertheless, the merchant did attempt to drag out the process as much as possible, sending a partial payment marked as a full one. We of course did not let the matter go, and explained to our client how best to respond to ensure prompt payment. Before long, I.G. was thrilled to have received all of his disputed funds back.

The MyChargeBack Difference

This case came to a successful conclusion for one simple reason: The savvy recovery agents at MyChargeBack know that nuances in language and terminology can impact the processing of a complex transaction dispute. And they know how to spot them, reverse direction and chart a different strategy best suited to the evidence they have at hand. 

That is not something that most consumers could be expected to do on their own. Indeed, the fine details of various credit card network rules (in addition to the laws and regulation in all relevant jurisdictions) is usually beyond the scope of most other chargeback professionals, even those in bank dispute departments, let alone merchants.

Luckily, I.G. had MyChargeBack on his side, and that made all the difference.

For more information about MyChargeBack’s chargeback services, click here.