The Federal Trade Commission, the US consumer protection authority, announced a settlement with payment processor Nuvei on 4 September 2026. The complaint and the stipulated order were filed in the US District Court for the District of Arizona under case number 2:26-cv-06306. Five group companies allegedly opened and maintained payment processing accounts for merchants they knew, or should have known, were deceiving buyers, among them a tech support operation known as Reimage and Restoro.
The defendants are Nuvei Corporation, Nuvei International Group Limited, Nuvei Limited, SafeCharge Digital Limited and Nuvei Technologies Inc. They neither admit nor deny the allegations. The monetary judgment is $4.85 million, payable jointly and severally within seven days of entry, and already held in escrow by their counsel. The Commission cleared the filing by a 2-0 vote, and a judge has yet to sign.
Merchant screening, the first piece of the regime
Screening, or underwriting, is the review run before a payment processing account is opened for a merchant. Card network rules require it, because most merchants reach the networks only through a processor. The order sets the minimum content of that review for a category it calls the Covered Client: outbound telemarketing, seven families of high-risk products, from tech support to debt relief services, and any client named over the past ten years in a US enforcement action for fraud or unfair practices.
- the nature of the business, the goods and services sold, the methods of sale;
- sales scripts, websites and a sample of marketing materials from the past two years;
- each acquirer and processor used over the preceding two years, with the merchant identification numbers on record;
- the chargeback rate for the past five months and the processing statements for the past six;
- any recent placement in a network monitoring programme, any termination for an excessive rate, any public complaint filed by the Commission or another state or federal law enforcement agency.
The joint statement from Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson and Commissioner Mark R. Meador sets out the reasoning. Section 5(n) of the FTC Act treats a practice as unfair when it causes substantial consumer injury that buyers cannot avoid and that no benefit to consumers or competition outweighs. The two signatories write that the Commission now reads that text as requiring it to plead, and then prove, that the processor “knew, should have known, or consciously avoided knowing”. The Commission had never formally taken this position, and Nuvei is the first case in which it pleads such knowledge. In June 2025 it had already obtained $5 million from another processor, Paddle, over unfair payment-processing practices.
The chargeback rate and the thresholds it trips
The chargeback rate is defined in the order as the number of chargebacks in a month divided by the total number of card transactions in that month. It measures the share of purchases that cardholders push back to their issuing bank. Visa and Mastercard use it to place a merchant account under heightened monitoring.
| Programme or duty | Trigger | Consequence |
|---|---|---|
| Visa Dispute Monitoring Program, before April 2025 | 100 disputes in the month and a rate above 1%, in some cases 0.9% | heightened monitoring |
| Visa Fraud Monitoring Program, before April 2025 | more than $75,000 in fraudulent transactions and a fraud-to-sales ratio of 0.9% or higher | heightened monitoring |
| Mastercard chargeback monitoring | 100 chargebacks or more and a monthly rate above 1% | warning letters and placement under monitoring |
| Mastercard excessive chargeback merchant | monthly rate above 1.5% for two months running | fines and possible termination |
| FTC order, mandatory investigation | rate above 1.0% and more than 75 chargebacks, in any two of the past six months | investigation, then closure within sixty days absent justification |
The order does not defer to network thresholds. It sets its own, and requires a monthly calculation for every client, account by account and in aggregate. Once the threshold is crossed, an investigation must open promptly: checking buyer authorisations, reviewing the merchant’s websites from an IP address unconnected to the group, and running test purchases and calls. After sixty days, processing stops and the accounts close, unless a written report establishes by clear and convincing evidence that the practices are neither deceptive nor unfair.
Spreading one seller across several accounts
The complaint describes a practice the industry calls load balancing, in which a merchant splits its volume across several merchant accounts so that the chargeback count and rate attached to each stay below the thresholds. Internal records cited by the Commission show that Reimage’s monthly rate exceeded 1% in 57 of the 60 months between January 2018 and December 2022, running from 4% to 9% in many of them, with no network warning in a good number of those months. In January 2019, a Mastercard audit flagged 82 accounts in the Nuvei Limited portfolio, at least 20 of them suspected of spreading chargebacks.
The order bars Nuvei from any tactic designed to evade fraud and risk monitoring programmes run by a financial institution, an acquirer or a payment system operator. It names the balancing of volume across merchant accounts or billing descriptors, shell companies, transactions where no goods or services change hands, the splitting of a single sale, and refunds issued before the chargeback reaches the network, without examining the cause. A separate ban covers merchants Nuvei knows or should know are listed on Mastercard’s MATCH database for excessive chargebacks, fraud, laundering or merchant collusion.
What the case shows about the acceptance chain
The order applies to a foreign entity only to the extent that its conduct falls within the Commission’s jurisdiction, and it binds only the five companies named. The mechanics it describes belong to the card networks, from the MATCH database checked before boarding a seller to the duty to list a merchant terminated for cause. Nuvei Limited, registered in Cyprus in 2002 under the name SafeCharge Limited, is a principal member of Visa and Mastercard, boards merchants under its own bank identification number, and is registered with the Central Bank of Cyprus as an electronic money transmitter.