¿Qué es, en realidad, el programa de control del fraude con tarjetas Visa? ¿Se puede evitar?

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 The mechanics below describe the retired VFMP for historical reference.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

Like the Visa Dispute Monitoring Program (VDMP), Visa Fraud Monitoring Program (VFMP) was an aspect of Visa’s fiduciary responsibility to its stakeholders. VFMP tracked merchants that got excessive fraud cases, and merchants worked to avoid enrollment in it.

Visa tracked every vendor’s dispute activity to help curtail different forms of fraud risks and promote the use of fraud controls. If a vendor reached Visa’s excessive fraud and disputes threshold, Visa would notify the acquirer. The acquirer is a financial institution that accepts and processes credit and debit card transactions on behalf of the vendor. With that notification, Visa would place the vendor in VFMP to reduce disputes.

Below were the three stages of the legacy Visa Fraud Monitoring Program:

1. Warning Stage: As the name suggests, the early warning stage prompted merchants to take action to find the causes of rising fraud levels. No fines applied at this stage since no rules had been violated yet.
2. Standard Stage: At the standard VFMP stage, Visa gave merchants a four-month window to get fraud issues under control.
3. Excessive Stage: This final stage was for vendors that breached the excessive Visa fraud threshold. Visa automatically placed vendors in a high-risk Merchant Category Code (MCC) in this bracket.

A merchant’s Visa fraud rate, the dollar value of transactions lost to fraud over a given month relative to total transaction value for the same period, determined where the merchant fell in the strata. Mastercard runs a comparable program for merchants with excessive chargebacks, called the Excessive Chargeback Merchant program.

Mastercard also runs a separate merchant audit program, the Mastercard GMAP, which reviews risk controls directly rather than tracking chargeback ratios.

Presentación sobre el Programa de Vigilancia del Fraude en Visados (VFMP)

Visa had developed two categories of fraud monitoring programs under VFMP to keep fraud as low as possible. Tools like real-time chargeback alerts help catch disputes before they escalate today.

1. Programa de Vigilancia del Fraude con Tarjetas de Crédito (VFMP)
2. Programa de supervisión del fraude con tarjetas Visa - 3D Secure (VFMP-3DS)

La primera está dirigida a usuarios de todo el mundo, mientras que la segunda es solo para comerciantes de EE. UU.

Visa reviewed merchant accounts monthly (ideally at the beginning of each month) and automatically enrolled those failing to comply with the VFMP standards into the 12-month program. Domestic and cross-border activity counted towards monthly totals for US, Europe, Canada, Australia, and Brazil users. Visa only considered cross-border transactions for merchants in other regions.

Fórmula para calcular las tasas de fraude en materia de visados

Visa calculated the threshold for a merchant’s account based on the fraud amount and ratio. In other words, the formula for calculating the fraud-to-sales rate was the sum of all fraud reports (a.k.a TC40 reports) received in the current month divided by monthly sales volume. For example, if a merchant received 100 fraud reports from 10,000 transactions in a given month, the fraud-to-sales ratio (fraud rate) was determined as follows: 100/10000x100 = 1%.

Likewise, to figure out a merchant's Visa Fraud Monitoring Program - 3D Secure fraud ratio, Visa used this formula: the USD amount of fraud reported on 3D Secure transactions in the current month divided by the sales amount processed through 3DS in the same month. The best long-term fix remains to prevent chargebacks before they happen.

The level of penalty a merchant received depended on the outcome of the above calculation, which was the number of months the account had exceeded the established thresholds. For instance, exceeding thresholds for the first time became identification Month 1; the second time became identification Month 2.

Comprender los umbrales del programa de control del fraude con tarjetas Visa

On October 1, 2019, Visa switched gears on its fraud mitigation processes by revising the threshold of the VFMP. The table below shows the risk thresholds Visa used to monitor vendors' transactions before VFMP was retired on April 1, 2025.

Visa Fraud Monitoring Program - 3D Secure (VFMP-3DS) had only the early warning and standard classifications.

The standard Visa Fraud Monitoring Program enforcement period was eight months. Although Visa did not place fines on vendors for standard VFMP, merchants did not enjoy fraud liability protection privileges. Visa automatically assigned merchants liability for fraud-related disputes. More so, excessive fraud merchants spent 12 months in the VFMP, which attracted costly non-compliance fees each month they breached the acceptable threshold. A structured approach to chargeback management keeps disputes under control today.

In essence, moving a merchant into the excessive fraud bracket signaled that Visa considered their margin of error in avoiding fraudulent transactions intolerable. The good news was that Visa tracked only the first ten fraudulent transactions or ten chargebacks (for VDMP) from a specific cardholder. If a scammer used one card to run twenty attacks on a business in one month, Visa only considered ten transactions.

¿Cuáles son las consecuencias de sobrepasar los umbrales del programa de control del fraude con tarjetas Visa?

Crossing the VFMP threshold used to raise operational costs exponentially, and it could also kill your business. For example, excessive fraud merchants incurred non-compliance fees for every month they breached the acceptable threshold, as shown below:

Merchants could only exit the Visa Fraud Monitoring Program after maintaining their fraud rate below the established threshold for three consecutive months. If a merchant navigated two months successfully and then breached the threshold again, Visa reset the count back to zero. Automating chargeback recovery can recover revenue that would otherwise stay lost.

Further, a merchant could only be transferred from a standard VFMP to an excessive-risk VFMP, not vice versa. Visa did not reclassify a vendor from the excessive risk monitoring program to the standard monitoring program, irrespective of their fraud resolution progress.

NOTA: Además de Visa, hay otras partes implicadas en los procesos de mediación en casos de devoluciones y fraude. Cuando un cliente o su banco presenta una reclamación sobre una transacción, Visa anula primero la transacción de tu entidad adquirente. A continuación, tu banco retirará el importe de la transacción de tu cuenta para compensar su pérdida.

Aunque los bancos saben que hay Contracargos casos de fraude inevitables, las entidades adquirentes y los procesadores suelen considerar disputas los comerciantes que reciben un número excesivo disputas un alto riesgo. De hecho, suelen dar de baja a dichos comerciantes, congelando o cancelando sus cuentas incluso antes de que superen los umbrales establecidos. En primer lugar, calcula tu ratio de contracargos para saber cuál es tu situación.

Sin una cuenta de comerciante activa, no hay forma de procesar pagos con tarjeta. Tampoco puedes recibir nuevas transacciones ni retirar los fondos disponibles. Como señaló un experto en pagos: «Consideran que no puedes gestionar tu problema persistente de fraude y, por ello, no mereces el beneficio de la duda cuando un cliente denuncia un fraude penal».

Here's more: if a merchant failed to remedy the situation, Visa could block it from accepting Visa payments altogether and permanently ban it from the network, which was a probable nail in the coffin for the business. Hence, merchants had to take every precautionary measure in the book to reduce fraud exposure risk. That principle still holds today under VAMP, which absorbed VFMP's monitoring role.

Cómo evitar el programa de control del fraude en materia de visados

The average eCommerce merchant in the United States deals with over 1,200 monthly fraud attacks. Being one of the defacto card networks, Visa is not lenient on fraud cases. Failure to keep a fraud rate low still means losing access to the platform. Today, that monitoring happens under VAMP, which replaced VFMP, so keeping your fraud rate low should remain a priority for your team.

A continuación te ofrecemos algunas recomendaciones que te ayudarán a dar los primeros pasos: Las redes de tarjetas aplican de forma estricta los límites máximos de las devoluciones.

Infórmate sobre el fraude en Internet

Si no sabes en qué consiste el fraude, siempre serás su presa. ¿Sabes cómo reconocer direcciones de correo electrónico sospechosas? ¿Estás al tanto de las anomalías en los pedidos, las técnicas de reconocimiento de patrones de fraude y las últimas novedades del sector? ¿Dispones de certificados SSL activos y de herramientas para impedir que cuentas potencialmente fraudulentas accedan a tu eCommerce ? No puedes proteger tu negocio de forma eficaz si no sabes cómo detectar y detener el fraude.

Revisar manualmente las transacciones marcadas

Revisar manualmente las transacciones resulta abrumador, teniendo en cuenta el volumen de trabajo que debe realizar un comerciante para poner en marcha su negocio. Sin embargo, combinar una evaluación digital con una revisión manual ayuda a tomar decisiones más acertadas. Si recibes una transacción procedente de una dirección IP sospechosa que parece potencialmente fraudulenta, podrías entrar en pánico y bloquear todas las transacciones posteriores. Sin embargo, es fundamental recordar que no todas las transacciones marcadas como dudosas por el software de detección de fraudes son realmente fraudulentas. De hecho, la mayoría de estas transacciones marcadas podrían ser legítimas. Por eso, los comerciantes que utilizan el servicio de automatización de disputas y fraudesChargeflow están obteniendo una relación calidad-precio increíble, ya que el sistema combina sus potentes análisis con la inteligencia humana para maximizar los resultados.

Reciba ayuda de expertos en fraude

El fraude digital es muy sofisticado hoy en día. Si no dispones del presupuesto necesario para desarrollar mecanismos sofisticados y de alta tecnología para la detección del fraude, lo más probable es que caigas en sus trampas una y otra vez. E incluso si cuentas con un equipo de analistas con buen ojo para detectar cada transacción fraudulenta, se trata de una tarea costosa. Desde el punto de vista empresarial, tiene más sentido contar con apoyo externo especializado y herramientas fiables como Chargeflow. Las normas de devolución de cargo de las redes de tarjetas marcan el curso de cada disputa.

La técnica de puntuación de fraude Chargeflow, altamente sofisticada y pionera en el sector, puede ayudarte a puntuar las transacciones según tus necesidades. Podrás clasificar rápidamente las transacciones en función de los estándares del sector, los problemas de fraude recurrentes, las zonas de los clientes, etc.

Descubre cómo Chargeflow ayudarte a crear una marca que alimente al mundo sin que el riesgo de fraude frene tus perspectivas de crecimiento.