Nuvei will pay $4.85 million to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it opened and maintained payment processing accounts for merchants it knew, or should have known, were deceiving consumers, the agency announced September 4, 2026. They included a tech support scam that operated as Reimage and Restoro, for which Nuvei processed more than $30 million in consumer payments from 2017 to 2023, according to the complaint. The stipulated order goes well beyond the money: it spells out how Nuvei must underwrite merchants and when a chargeback rate must trigger an investigation, and it bans spreading one seller’s volume across accounts to stay under network monitoring thresholds.
The complaint and order were filed in the US District Court for the District of Arizona, case No. 2:26-cv-06306. The defendants are Canada-based Nuvei Corporation, Nuvei International Group Limited, Nuvei Limited, SafeCharge Digital Limited, and Nuvei Technologies Inc. They neither admit nor deny the allegations. The $4.85 million judgment, which will fund consumer redress, is owed jointly and severally and is due within seven days of the order’s entry. Defense counsel already holds the money in escrow. The Commission voted 2-0 to file, and the order still needs a judge’s signature.
Underwriting starts with a defined class of risky clients
Underwriting is the review a processor runs before it opens a merchant account. Card network rules require it, because most merchants reach the networks only through a processor. The order sets a minimum standard for a category it calls the Covered Client: merchants that sell through outbound telemarketing, merchants in seven high-risk product categories ranging from tech support to debt relief services, and any client named in the past 10 years in a public complaint by a US authority over fraud or unfair or deceptive practices. Before boarding one, Nuvei must obtain:
- a description of the business, the goods and services it sells, and its methods of sale;
- sales scripts, websites, and a sample of the marketing materials it used in the past two years;
- every acquirer and processor it used in the preceding two years, with any known merchant identification numbers;
- its chargeback rate for the past five months and its processing statements for the past six;
- any recent placement in a card network monitoring program, any termination for excessive chargeback rates, and any public complaint filed by the FTC or another federal or state law enforcement agency.
The FTC now ties processor liability to knowledge
In a joint statement, Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson and Commissioner Mark R. Meador lay out the legal theory. Under Section 5(n) of the FTC Act, a practice is unfair if it causes substantial injury to consumers that they cannot reasonably avoid and that is not outweighed by benefits to consumers or competition. The two commissioners write that they read Section 5 to require the Commission “to plead, and eventually to prove, that the processor knew, should have known, or consciously avoided knowing” that a merchant’s transactions were unlawful. The agency had never formally taken that position, and Nuvei is the first case in which it has pleaded such knowledge. In June 2025, it obtained $5 million from another processor, Paddle, over unfair payment-processing practices.
The order sets its own chargeback trigger
The order defines the chargeback rate as the number of chargebacks in a month divided by the total number of card transactions that month. It measures the share of purchases that cardholders dispute with their issuing bank. Visa and Mastercard use it to place merchant accounts under heightened monitoring.
| Program or requirement | Trigger | Consequence |
|---|---|---|
| Visa Dispute Monitoring Program (before April 2025) | 100 disputes in a month and a rate above 1% (0.9% in some years) | 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 or more chargebacks and a monthly rate above 1% | Warning letters and placement in monitoring |
| Mastercard excessive chargeback merchant | Monthly rate above 1.5% for two consecutive months | 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 60 days absent justification |
Rather than adopt the networks’ thresholds, the order sets its own and requires Nuvei to calculate the rate every month for each client, account by account and in aggregate. Crossing the line triggers a prompt investigation: verifying consumer authorizations, reviewing the merchant’s websites from an IP address not associated with Nuvei, and running test purchases and test calls. Within 60 days, Nuvei must stop processing and close the accounts unless it writes a report establishing, by clear and convincing evidence, that the merchant’s practices are neither deceptive nor unfair.
Load balancing kept Reimage under the networks’ radar
The complaint describes a practice the industry calls load balancing: a merchant spreads its volume across several merchant accounts so that the chargeback count and rate on each one stay below network thresholds. Nuvei’s internal records, as cited by the FTC, show Reimage’s monthly chargeback rate above 1% in 57 of the 60 months from January 2018 through December 2022, and between 4% and 9% in many of them. In many of those months, the networks sent no warning. In January 2019, a Mastercard audit of Nuvei Limited’s portfolio flagged 82 accounts, at least 20 of them suspected of load balancing chargebacks.
The order bars Nuvei from any tactic meant to evade the fraud and risk monitoring programs of a financial institution, an acquirer, or a payment system operator. It names spreading volume across multiple merchant accounts or billing descriptors, using shell companies, submitting transactions in which no goods or services change hands, splitting a single sale into smaller ones, and issuing refunds before a chargeback reaches the network without examining why chargebacks are running high. A separate ban covers merchants that Nuvei knows or has reason to know are on Mastercard’s MATCH list for excessive chargebacks, fraud, laundering, or merchant collusion.
The rules at issue are the card networks’ own
The order reaches a foreign entity only to the extent its conduct falls within the FTC’s jurisdiction, and it binds only the five companies. The mechanisms it describes, however, are card network rules, from checking the MATCH list before boarding a merchant to the duty to add a merchant terminated for cause. Nuvei Limited, registered in Cyprus in 2002 as SafeCharge Limited, is a principal member of Visa and Mastercard, boards merchants under its own bank identification number (BIN), and is registered with the Central Bank of Cyprus as an electronic money transmitter.