From a dispute to a chargeback
Someone spots a charge they don’t recognize and calls the bank. What happens next is a chain the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency lays out in its Merchant Processing booklet (version 1.0, August 2014).
With a credit card, the consumer first tries to settle with the merchant, then tells the card-issuing bank, which posts a temporary credit and asks the merchant for documents. If the issuer upholds the dispute, “the amount is charged back to the merchant’s account.”
The booklet sorts chargebacks into four groups. Technical ones cover an expired authorization or a bank processing error, clerical ones a duplicate bill or a refund never issued, quality ones goods that never arrived, and fraud ones a purchase the cardholder says they didn’t authorize.
The clocks that apply
Card protections run on deadlines, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau publishes them.
| Payment | What the cardholder must do | What it protects |
|---|---|---|
| Credit card | Send a written billing error notice within 60 calendar days after the charge appeared on the statement | The right to have a wrong charge removed |
| Debit card, lost or stolen | Tell the bank within two business days of discovering the loss | Liability capped at $50 or the amount taken, whichever is less, and up to $500 after that |
| Debit card, charge on the statement | Report within 60 days of the statement | Avoids paying for later transactions the bank could have stopped |
| Crypto transfer | No dispute right | None, unless the recipient returns the funds |
The credit card row comes from the CFPB’s billing dispute answer, which adds that the card company then has 30 days to confirm it received the notice. The debit rows come from its page on unauthorized transactions, which gives a bank 10 business days, generally, to investigate.
Why crypto has no chargeback
The design is deliberate. The Bitcoin white paper begins by arguing that banks can never offer fully non-reversible payments, because they cannot avoid mediating disputes. Its proposal was transactions “computationally impractical to reverse,” which it said would protect sellers from fraud, with escrow left as the way to protect buyers.
The cost lands on the sender. Cryptocurrency payments “typically are not reversible,” the Federal Trade Commission warns on its consumer page, and once you have paid, you can usually get money back only if the person you paid sends it back. The FTC adds that crypto payments do not carry the legal protections that credit and debit cards have.
The trade-off for merchants
For a shop, no chargebacks also means no chargeback fraud. Customers, though, lose their dispute route and are left with the shop’s own refund policy, which is why a guide to accepting stablecoin payments puts writing that policy before the first payment. A card purchase of crypto sits in between. The card charge itself follows card rules, while the coins, once sent on to another wallet, follow the blockchain’s.