That's assuming the bank actually finds the transaction(s) were fraudulent when they do their "investigation". If they disagree with you and decide it wasn't fraudulent for whatever reason it's quite often a giant pain to argue with them and get it sorted out.
There was a relatively recent case of Bank of America deciding eight months later that it wasn't a fraud and clawing back their provisional refund. It turns out that the original card was intercepted in the mail and they simply issued a duplicate without preventing the use of the first, but it took the victim's attorneys to get the evidence from the bank, connect the dots and figure out this happened.
I got some details wrong; in particular, the initial dispute denial was after two months (with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau agreeing with the bank after another two months), and the resolution followed NJ Advance Media contacting BofA.
Exactly this. I bought something online. The company shipped it, but FedEx screwed up and sent it back to the merchant. The merchant never responded to me after that and then went bankrupt. I called my bank (Square) and they said it wasn't fraud as the package had been "delivered". I pointed out it had been delivered back to the merchant, and they said that still counted as delivered in their support script. They told me the only way to fix it was to call FedEx and somehow scam them into changing the status of the package online. I tried to get them to change their support script but they decided it was easier just to terminate my account instead.
This exact scam happened to a coworker's wife and the bank refused to consider it fraud since she "authorized" it by giving the confirmation code for Apple Pay to the attacker.
I find it interesting that this is the level of detail discussed with the bank. Our family has had 3 instances of unauthorized charges over the years, and the most we've ever done was to sign a form that basically says "we didn't make these charges"
Did they volunteer these details or were they asked? This is just conjecture, but sometimes when people volunteer too much information to front-line support you can get erratic responses if they latch on to superficial parts of the story rather than the underlying message.
i.e. support just hears "I gave someone access", and they close the ticket under "customer authorized someone else to purchase", because they're following a decision tree, not analyzing the root cause of a security incident.
In general, banking customer service sucks. I try to buy everything on my AMEX. Their service is excellent. I've never had to fill out a dispute form or give them any kind of proof when disputing a transaction, just a short call and they take care of it.
This is one of the nice things with credit cards. I've never had an issue with a chargeback, and in the case where a card was stolen the charges were just reversed.
The burden of proof is on the merchant. If they don’t have a signed receipt or video evidence they probably can’t win (so any online purchases are doomed). I’ve never failed a dispute in around 25 times, including several in the range of $2k+
No it's not. It's on you to persuade the bank it was fraudulent. If the bank doesn't believe it is fraudulent then they won't claw the money back from the merchant. Source: personal experience.
