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A chargeback is a reversal of charges back to the person who made it. The right to a credit card chargeback has its roots in U.S. legislation. Every credit card company has its own rules for credit card chargebacks and disputes.
What is the legal basis for credit card chargebacks? Credit cards were first issued in the 1950s but they lacked consumer protection. That changed with the Fair Credit Billing Act of 1974, which was passed to give American credit card holders those rights, including the right to a chargeback. In 1978, the Electronic Fund Transfer Act provided many similar rights to debit card holders.
Although there are two different laws governing credit card and debit card chargebacks, the Discover chargeback process makes little distinction between credit cards and debit cards. .
While it is similar to its competitors Visa and Mastercard, a Discover Card chargeback is fundamentally different in one important way. No cards are actually issued by Visa or Mastercard; it’s the cardholder’s issuing bank that does that. It is therefore the bank that handles payment disputes, while the networks are available for arbitration in extraordinary cases.
Discover cards, on the other hand, are issued directly by the company through its corporation known as Discover Bank. Dispute processes and Discover chargebacks are therefore handled internally and directly. However, the situation is not quite as simple as that. Since the early 2000s, there have been a number of banks that issue Discover cards. They are a minority, but in the event that you have a third-party Discover card, your disputes and Discover chargebacks will go through the issuing bank just like Visa and Mastercard.
If like most Discover cardholders, your card was issued by Discover Bank, they are the ones you must contact for a Discover chargeback or to dispute a transaction. Discover can be contacted for payment disputes by logging onto your online account or by calling 1-800-DISCOVER (1-800-347-2683). You can also file a dispute by sending a letter to Discover’s Salt Lake City headquarters, but this can be both insecure and time-consuming.
Once you have made your claim, you can expect one of three outcomes:
A Discover chargeback will be granted right away mainly if it is a proven case of fraud, meaning an unauthorized transaction on a lost or stolen card. On the other hand, a Discover chargeback claim may be rejected right away for various reasons, including if it wasn’t filed under the correct reason code. If you feel your claim was unfairly dismissed, talk to Rapidcoin professionals. We can also help you bolster your case during the Discover card chargeback dispute process.
Every card network categorizes payment disputes and assigns a reason code to each type. Discover is no different, and like the others, its reason codes follow a unique format shared with no one else. The Discover Card chargeback code format is a pair of letters, occasionally followed by one or two digits. As opposed to Visa and Mastercard which use four main chargeback categories, Discover (and American Express) use five. Nevertheless, almost all consumer payment disputes will fall into one of just two: fraud and cardholder dispute.
One major difference in how Discover disputes transactions, as compared with other card networks, has to do with timeframes. Whereas other issuers have strict chargeback time limits, Discover simply recommends that all disputes be raised within 120 days of the transaction but may approve a chargeback even after that.