Chargeback

The card system’s consumer-protection weapon: a cardholder disputes a transaction and the money is clawed back through the network’s adjudication process, with liability assigned by rulebook. Merchants experience it as a tax; cardholders experience it as the reason they’ll hand a 16-digit number to a stranger’s website. For agentic rails the chargeback is the uncomfortable benchmark: the dispute layer most of them haven’t built yet (cut-0213, forthcoming).