Point of Sale (POS) merchants operating in Nigeria have called on the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to change its policy towards charge-back claims on transactions, citing increasing fraud cases.
According to a statement by the operators in Abuja, the extant CBN policy allows POS cardholders to lodge a chargeback claim within six months of the transaction, while the POS merchants have only 48 hours to defend the claim, otherwise, the merchants will be automatically debited by the switch company.
The operators said fraudulent cardholders had adopted a strategy to wait for a month or more before raising a false charge-back claim with their banks.
They said the two-day window for the POS operators was not enough to defend the claim as they would have to look for the transaction receipt, which might either have faded out or archived.
“Merchants have reportedly lost millions of naira to fraudsters as reports show rising cases of this type of fraud in the country,” they stated.
The merchants, however, want the CBN to mandate banks to reject the false charge-backs at their end, using the evidence they already have in their system.
They also called on the apex bank to review the complaint handling strategy.
“We are proposing that cardholders should have a maximum of one month to claim, while merchants should have one to two weeks to defend claims,” they merchants stated.
