Todo lo que hay que saber sobre el Programa de Seguimiento de Disputas de Visa y cómo evitar el VDMP

Update (September 2026): Visa retired the Visa Dispute Monitoring Program (VDMP) on April 1, 2025, consolidating it with the Visa Fraud Monitoring Program (VFMP) into a single Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP). The mechanics and figures below describe the retired VDMP for historical reference. For current thresholds, fees, and enforcement dates, see the VAMP guide linked above.

Visa Dispute Monitoring Program (VDMP for short) was how Visa scrutinized merchants to identify vendors that attracted abnormal payment disputes. It was established to ferret out culprits participating in merchant fraud, allow genuine vendors to handle their chargebacks, safeguard cardholders, and preserve the Visa brand.

Aside from Visa, banks also used the VDMP to pick out vendors who exceeded established chargeback thresholds and guide them in sorting things out. VDMP also served for fraud control evaluations and operations reviews.

Mastercard lleva a cabo una iniciativa similar, aunque distinta, denominada «Mastercard GMAP», que se centra en las auditorías de riesgo de los comerciantes, en lugar de en la aplicación de ratios de devoluciones.

Nevertheless, entering the Visa Dispute Monitoring Program was bad news for any merchant, and it was wise to do everything possible to avoid it. That risk now lives under VAMP.

¿Qué es el Programa de seguimiento de disputas de Visa?

Visa Dispute Monitoring Program was an aspect of Visa’s fiduciary responsibility to its stakeholders, whereby it tracked merchants that got excessive chargebacks and disputes.

When a vendor went beyond its established monthly chargeback threshold, Visa moved the vendor into the VDMP program.

The results were excessive processing fees, operating cutbacks, and expensive periodic reviews.

Entering into the Visa Dispute Monitoring Program meant that Visa saw a merchant’s recent transaction activity as risky, contingent on how many chargebacks it received in the previous month.

There were three levels of the VDMP. A merchant’s VDMP level was determined by the predetermined chargeback ratios and thresholds Visa used at the time:

1. Alerta temprana de VDMP: índice de devoluciones del 0,65 % y 75 Contracargos

A merchant in the early warning VDMP stage was not technically enrolled in the program. The early warning stage was Visa and the merchant’s bank’s way of signaling impending danger.

2. Norma VDMP: índice de contracargos del 0,9 % y 100 Contracargos

At this stage, Visa gave merchants a probationary period of four months to track down the causes of disputes and get the chargeback situation under control. Failure to achieve that objective meant Visa started an eight-month enforcement period.

3. VDMP excesivo: índice de devoluciones del 1,8 % y 1.000 Contracargos

This Visa Dispute Monitoring Program level was for vendors who breached the established excessive Visa dispute threshold. By default, Visa placed vendors in a high-risk Merchant Category Code (MCC) bracket when they crossed the excessive dispute threshold. Mastercard runs a comparable tier for merchants with excessive chargebacks, called the Excessive Chargeback Merchant program.

¿Qué ocurre si me inscribo en el VDMP?

Entering the Visa Dispute Monitoring Program placed a significant burden on a merchant’s business. For starters, merchants attracted substantial fees and costs throughout the oversight period.

Visa placed a $50 fine on merchants in the VDMP Standard level for each dispute they received, beginning in the fourth month of the enforcement period.

Merchants with excessive chargeback rates spent 12 months in the program and were equally made to pay a $50 fine on each dispute filed against them, from the beginning of the enforcement period. Although these fees were placed on the acquirer, they were ultimately passed on to the merchant.

Aside from the fines, merchants also faced expensive review fees. Merchants in both the standard and excessive programs were made to pay a review fee of $25,000 near the close of the enforcement period.

¿Qué ocurre si no consigo que mi tasa de devoluciones esté por debajo del límite establecido por Visa?

If a merchant entered the VDMP, Visa expected the merchant and its acquirer to work together in crafting a detailed chargeback mitigation plan that traced the sources of disputes and provided a commensurate action plan to address them.

Not creating an effective chargeback reduction strategy to meet the demands of exiting the VDMP within 12 months resulted in more sanctions. Visa could disqualify a merchant account, blocking it from processing any Visa card transactions, which could be fatal for a business that relied on Visa for the bulk of its volume.

¿Cómo puedo darme de baja del VDMP?

In principle, Visa established the VDMP to encourage vendors to take chargeback mitigation seriously, not as a form of punishment for receiving chargebacks.

So if you’re wondering, could a merchant exit the VDMP? The answer was yes.

But that only happened if a merchant succeeded in lowering its chargeback rate below the monthly threshold and kept it there for three months in a row. If a merchant achieved that for two months and then crossed the threshold again in the third month, the clock reset to zero.

For a business already in deep water, the recommended path was (and still is) to track the root causes of chargebacks and establish dispute mitigation procedures to:

• Selecciona las transacciones válidas y reduce los falsos positivos.
• Reducir las transacciones no autorizadas.
• Elimina los factores que provocan devoluciones evitables, como los errores de los comerciantes.
• Lucha contra Contracargos indebidos.
• Fomentar las relaciones con el sector.

If a merchant managed to exit the VDMP, Visa lifted all restrictions and business returned to normal. The challenge was that Visa expected merchants to make this happen as quickly as possible, which required significant human and financial resources. Not exiting the program within 12 months resulted in an indefinite suspension of processing rights, and acquirers could also drop a merchant they came to see as too much of a burden.

¿El VDMP es lo mismo que el VFMP? ¿Y cómo puedo evitar que me inscriban en el VDMP?

The VDMP was much like the Visa Fraud Monitoring Program (VFMP), though the two differed in compliance standards and expectations for merchants. Visa retired both programs on April 1, 2025 and folded them into the Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP). We covered VFMP’s legacy mechanics extensively in this piece.

Today, the equivalent goal is avoiding enrollment in VAMP, which still requires practical, disciplined chargeback mitigation. The standard practice remains the same: avoid disputes of all kinds.

Lo ideal sería elaborar una estrategia de mitigación de contracargos por niveles para garantizar que no se estén mitigando los fraudes delictivos mientras que Contracargos por errores de los comerciantes se estén pasando por alto. Sin embargo, un espectro tan amplio de mitigación de disputas requiere datos precisos y tácticas de prevención bien fundamentadas.

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Handling chargebacks and disputes can be overwhelming and complicated, and if not done professionally, the outcomes can significantly hurt a business' bottom line. If you need help detecting friendly fraud, lowering chargeback exposure, stopping disputes, or keeping your chargeback ratio below Visa's VAMP threshold, Chargeflow can help. Learn more about our software and start your free test right away.