The news: Payment providers’ current tools are insufficient for catching AI-enabled chargeback fraud, especially for when autonomous agents take over the shopping journey, per Chargeback911.

How we got here: The rise of AI has made it easier to commit chargeback fraud. 

• Reports of genAI-enabled scams rose 456% from April 2024 to May 2025, per Chainabuse, TRM’s open-source fraud reporting platform. 
• 46% of merchants are concerned about AI’s potential to enable fraud, per Ravelin.
• And 65% of consumers agree that AI has made it easier to falsely claim refunds, per Ravelin.

Why this matters: Payment providers stand to eat heavy losses through fraudulent chargebacks without developing ways to catch AI scams. 

Fraud concerns also reduce consumers’ likelihood of enrolling in agentic commerce. Shoppers’ No. 1 concern with adopting agentic payments is how their data is being handled online, per Nosto. 

While merchants, payment providers, and banks all anticipate volume gains from agentic commerce, per BCG. Failure to close gaps in chargeback and return AI fraud could dissuade consumers from trusting agentic rails.

Implications for payment providers: AI is already becoming deeply intertwined with how users shop. Making early investments in new systems to detect AI fraud increases consumers’ and participating merchants’ trust in the technology and encourages more spending under the assumption that bad activity will be stopped while legitimate returns and chargebacks will be accepted.

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