What happens if I cross a chargeback threshold?
You enter a card scheme monitoring programme: monthly fees, a remediation plan and a deadline to get back under. Sustained failure to exit leads to termination, and in some cases a MATCH listing that follows you.
Crossing a threshold is not an instant termination. It starts a process, and the process has a clock.
You are notified through your acquirer, not by the card network directly. The acquirer usually has the worse news to deliver, because the fees land on them first and get passed on.
Monthly fees begin. These are per-dispute in addition to the chargeback itself, and they escalate the longer you stay in the programme.
You are expected to produce a remediation plan. What changed, what you are doing about it, and by when. This is a real document that a real person reads.
A reserve usually appears or increases, because the acquirer’s exposure just went up.
If you exit within the window, it ends there and life resumes with a mark on your record that future underwriters will ask about.
If you do not, termination follows, and depending on the reason the acquirer may add a MATCH listing — which is the part with a five-year tail.
The practical advice is unglamorous: react in the first month. The merchants who get out are the ones who treated the first notification as urgent rather than as a fee to absorb.