---
title: "Merchants Have Underestimated Friendly Fraud Rates"
date: 2026-09-28
author: "chargebacks911"
featured_image: "https://chargebacks911.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Press-WiseVoter.jpg"
categories:
  - name: "Press"
    url: "/press.md"
---

# Merchants Have Underestimated Friendly Fraud Rates

The 2026 *Chargeback Field Report* was recently featured in a new article from Wisevoter examining how merchants may be underestimating the prevalence of friendly fraud. The article highlights a significant gap between merchants’ perceptions of chargeback activity and the broader data surrounding first-party fraud.

The Wisevoter feature focuses on Chargebacks911’s finding that merchants estimate friendly fraud accounts for 43.8% of their chargebacks. By comparison, Chargebacks911’s internal data indicates that friendly fraud accounts for as much as 86% of the chargebacks it handles. The article also points to the growing prevalence of the problem, with 83.4% of enterprise merchants reporting an increase in [friendly fraud](https://chargebacks911.com/friendly-fraud/ "Friendly Fraud") over the past three years.

“Friendly fraud has moved from being a back-office inconvenience to a material business risk,” said Monica Eaton, Founder and CEO of Chargebacks911, commenting on the feature. “It is influencing pricing, customer policies, staffing decisions and the economics of digital commerce.”

The disparity between merchant estimates and internal industry data underscores the difficulty of accurately identifying friendly fraud. Not every invalid dispute is clearly intentional, and [chargebacks](https://chargebacks911.com/chargebacks/ "Chargebacks 101") can arise from confusion, buyer’s remorse, impatience, or deliberate misuse. Chargebacks911’s research suggests that merchants need better visibility into transaction, customer, and dispute data to distinguish legitimate disputes from first-party misuse and respond effectively as the problem continues to grow.