Visa's VAMP Explained for Nutra: The Ratio That Gets Your MID Killed

What is VAMP and which old Visa programs did it replace?

VAMP is Visa's single fraud-and-dispute monitoring program for acquirers, effective 1 April 2025, and it replaced five separate remediation tracks including the Visa Dispute Monitoring Program and the Visa Fraud Monitoring Program. Visa Corporate describes the consolidation as collapsing 38 separate remediation processes into one global structure, covering acquirers everywhere Visa operates rather than region by region.

Before VAMP, an acquirer tracked disputes and fraud on two different scorecards with two different math models, so a merchant could clear VDMP while quietly failing VFMP, or the reverse. VAMP blends both into a single ratio, which means an offer with clean chargeback numbers but a rising fraud-report count from issuers now shows up on the same line an operator used to watch for disputes alone.

How is the VAMP ratio calculated — what counts as fraud vs. dispute?

The VAMP Ratio is [Count of Fraud (TC40) + Disputes (TC15)] divided by [Count of Settled Transactions (TC05)], counted only on card-not-present VisaNet transactions, domestic and cross-border, per Visa's Acquirer Monitoring Program fact sheet. Card-present swipes and chip transactions never enter the calculation, which matters for nutra because almost the entire vertical sells through card-not-present checkout pages.

TC40 is the fraud report an issuer files when a cardholder tells their bank the charge was fraudulent, regardless of whether a formal dispute ever follows. TC15 is the chargeback financial message itself, and TC05 is simply the count of transactions that settled. A single bad rebill can generate both a TC40 and a TC15 from the same cardholder complaint, so one angry customer can add two units to the numerator against one unit of lifetime volume in the denominator.

What is the merchant excessive threshold now, and when did it last drop?

The merchant Excessive threshold in the US, EU, Canada and Asia-Pacific dropped from 220bps to 150bps on 1 April 2026, according to the footnote in Visa's fact sheet corroborated by the Merchant Risk Council. CEMEA stayed at 220bps and LAC was already at 150bps before the change, so the tightening was regional rather than global.

Every threshold carries a second condition operators tend to forget: a merchant only enters Excessive when the ratio and a monthly count of at least 1,500 combined fraud-and-dispute transactions are both met. A small-volume offer with a bad ratio but under 1,500 monthly bad transactions stays outside the program on the count test alone, at least on paper.

Why do acquirer-level thresholds (0.5% / 0.7%) hit you before you breach anything?

Acquirer-level enforcement starts far below the merchant line: Visa flags an acquirer's whole VAMP portfolio Above Standard at 50bps and Excessive at 70bps, with acquirer Above Standard enforcement live since 1 January 2026. Those numbers apply to the acquirer's blended book across every merchant it sponsors, not to your MID in isolation, per the fact sheet and Merchant Risk Council commentary.

This is the detail most nutra operators miss: your acquirer will act on your account long before Visa ever calls your ratio Excessive, because your bad transactions are diluting a shared number across dozens or hundreds of other merchants on the same high-risk BIN. A merchant sitting comfortably at 90bps — nowhere near the 150bps merchant line — can still get squeezed, re-priced or non-renewed if the acquirer's aggregate portfolio is drifting toward 50bps and your MID is one of the larger contributors to that drift.

That is a structural incentive, not a courtesy. The acquirer's own enforcement fees start at $4 per fraud-or-dispute transaction at Above Standard and $8 at Excessive with no warning tier, so the acquirer has direct financial reason to trim volume from any merchant pulling its blended ratio upward, whether or not that merchant is anywhere close to its own threshold.

Do Rapid Dispute Resolution and CE3.0 deflections count against the ratio?

RDR resolutions are excluded from the VAMP ratio's dispute count, but the exclusion only removes the TC15 leg, not any TC40 fraud report the issuer already filed. Visa's own rule-language update confirms that when a participating merchant returns a merchant-credit response, Visa Resolve Online still submits a dispute financial via a TC15 internally — RDR just keeps that TC15 out of the VAMP numerator, it does not erase the underlying record.

Compelling Evidence 3.0 works the other side of the same transaction: it is the tool that can get an issuer to withdraw the TC40 fraud leg, not the TC15 dispute leg. Chargeback Gurus' analysis treats this as the practical takeaway for card-not-present sellers, because a single dispute can spawn both a TC40 and a TC15, so clearing one bad transaction out of the numerator generally needs RDR-style deflection paired with an accepted CE3.0 response, and neither tool alone does the whole job.

Order Insight, the Visa-side delivery channel for CE3.0 data, reportedly deflects somewhere around 40-45% of friendly-fraud inquiries before they become disputes at all, per industry analyses that still need independent confirmation. An inquiry deflected before it becomes a TC15 never touches the VAMP ratio in the first place, which is a materially better outcome than winning a representment after the chargeback has already counted against you.

What happens operationally when a nutra MID gets flagged?

Flagging starts a fee clock, not a warning letter, once a merchant crosses into Excessive: Visa's program applies no warning tier at that level, so the $8-per-transaction fee attaches from the reporting period in which the merchant qualifies. Acquirers typically pass part or all of that fee straight through to the merchant, on top of whatever reserve or rolling-hold terms already apply to the MID.

Termination is not automatic at Excessive — the program is built around fees and portfolio pressure on the acquirer, not an automatic kill switch — but a MID that stays in Excessive for consecutive periods becomes the one non-renewing acquirers cut first when they rebalance their own book toward the 50bps and 70bps lines.

• Reserve terms tighten first, often moving from a standard 5%-15% rolling reserve toward the higher end or to an upfront-funded reserve, per Corepay's high-risk merchant account guidance.
• The acquirer requests a written remediation plan and usually a reason-code breakdown, because [10.4 and 13.x tell very different stories about where the fault actually sits](/compliance/nutra-chargeback-reason-codes-what-10-4-and-13-x-are-telling-you).
• If the acquirer terminates for cause under an excessive-chargeback or excessive-fraud finding, it reports the merchant to MATCH within one business day, and that record follows the listed principal, not just the entity, for five years.
• A new LLC formed by the same owner does not escape a MATCH listing, because the reporting acquirer is required to submit the owner's name, address and tax ID alongside the merchant record.

How should a rebill offer owner monitor the ratio weekly?

Track your own approximation of the VAMP math every week, not monthly: pull fraud alerts and chargebacks received, divide by CNP settled transactions for the same window, and treat 100bps as an internal alarm line well ahead of Visa's 150bps merchant threshold. Waiting for the monthly acquirer report to tell you the number means you find out after the period that counted against you has already closed.

Break the count down by reason code before you touch the aggregate ratio, because 10.4 and 13.2 volume calls for a different fix than 13.1, 13.3 or 13.6 volume. A spike concentrated in cancelled-subscription disputes usually means your cancellation flow or trial-end messaging needs work; a spike in not-received or not-as-described claims usually points to fulfilment or the offer page itself, and mixing the two into one weekly number hides which lever to pull.

• Watch enumeration activity alongside disputes: Visa's Enumeration Ratio threshold sits at 20% of authorization attempts with a 300,000-transaction floor, and a card-testing wave on your BIN can distort your CNP denominator before a single dispute lands.
• Check offer and page uptime as part of the same weekly pass, since a broken checkout or a dead redirect that keeps taking orders after an offer is pulled is a direct path to 13.1 and 13.2 volume — the failure mode [uptime and link monitoring for nutra buyers](/compare/when-the-offer-dies-mid-flight-uptime-and-link-monitoring-for-nutra-bu) is built to catch before it turns into disputes.
• Log RDR and CE3.0 outcomes separately from raw disputes, since a rising deflection rate can mask a rising underlying fraud-report count that will still show up in next month's TC40 total.

What remediation do acquirers expect to see before they terminate?

Acquirers expect a documented, working mitigation plan before they extend a flagged MID, not a promise that things will improve. That plan typically needs to show pre-dispute tooling in production — Verifi Order Insight or Mastercard's Ethoca Consumer Clarity, or both — because a deflected inquiry never becomes a TC15 and never touches the ratio the acquirer is being scored on.

None of this guarantees the acquirer keeps the MID open. Where the file shows the same principal running MID after MID with rising fraud-report counts, acquirers increasingly read that pattern the way Mastercard's new Scam Merchant Monitoring Program reads it from 24 July 2026 — as a scam signal in its own right, independent of any single ratio.

• Evidence that cancellation and billing disclosure meet current law: ROSCA's three-part test for negative-option billing, plus state rules that survived the 2025 Eighth Circuit vacatur of the FTC's Click-to-Cancel amendments — California's AB 2863 one-step cancellation link, New York's GBL 527/527-a renewal reminders, and Colorado's SB25-145, effective 16 February 2026, all remain fully enforceable.
• A clean answer on MID structure: multiple MIDs for load balancing are not themselves a violation, but every MID has to be disclosed to the acquirer and mapped to the entity and product it was actually underwritten for.
• A falling, not flat, weekly ratio trend across the remediation window, since acquirers read a plateau as a sign the plan is not working, whatever the plan document claims.

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