Introducing the Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program

For the global payments ecosystem, which depends on seamless, secure interoperability for success, every participant must do its part for commerce to flourish. At Visa, we think about security 24/7/365, our focus and resources going toward constant innovation and education that helps reduce fraud at each point of a transaction.

While we helped prevent over $40 billion in fraud last year, our work is never done. That's why Visa is introducing the evolved and improved Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP), which seeks to ultimately reduce fraud and enumeration across the global payments ecosystem by helping acquirers improve their risk controls. The new VAMP has the potential to address four times the amount of fraud globally, accounting for more than $2.5 billion in losses, compared to previous programs.

Why VAMP matters

The rapidly evolving payment ecosystem, increasing complexity of players involved and technological advancements in payment methods have resulted in the rise of fraud, disputes, and enumeration attacks. Enumeration, which is a rapid, brute force card testing attack at scale, leads to $1.1 billion annually in fraud losses.¹ Disputes are also a growing concern; consumers disputed approximately $11 billion worth of charges with U.S. card issuers last year (up from $7.2 billion in 2019),² and Visa has a unique ability to help ensure the disputes processed are above board.

Visa and our clients have a collective calling to protect each party in the payment journey - from acquirers and issuers to merchants and consumers - from fraudulent activity. VAMP creates more seamless controls and processes for acquirers and merchants to effectively deter fraud and enumeration and effectively manage disputes, contributing to a more secure environment.

What is VAMP

The evolved VAMP, effective April 1, 2025, consolidates five existing fraud and dispute programs into a single acquirer program and streamlines 38 distinct remediation processes into a single process. The program also works to:

• Create globally aligned fraud thresholds for both domestic and cross-border card-not-present transactions, providing clarity and consistency for acquirers and their merchants.

• Incorporate enumeration criteria based on the number of enumerated authorization transactions and enumeration rate, to foster and promote best practices that guard against this growing attack vector from sophisticated fraudsters.

• Evolve from a program designed from outlier management to a lifecycle risk management approach, leading to more comprehensive fraud prevention across the ecosystem.

The future of fraud management

At Visa, we are constantly searching for ways to further protect and strengthen the integrity of our payments system - we have invested more than $10 billion over the last five years alone to prevent fraud and improve digital commerce infrastructure. This next step is an evolution of our fraud management approach to help support and enhance secure business practices across the ecosystem.

Learn more about Visa's efforts to secure the ecosystem at https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/visa-security.html

¹ Enumeration Fraud Loss from VAAI FY23

²Reversing a Credit-Card Charge Has Never Been Easier-or More Abused - WSJ

Tag: Payment Security