What is a chargeback?

How the process actually runs

1. You tell your bank a card transaction was wrong — not authorised, not delivered, not as described.
2. Your bank raises a dispute under a reason code, and provisionally credits you.
3. The card network passes it to the merchant’s bank, which takes the money back from the merchant.
4. The merchant can contest it with evidence, within a deadline — 30 days per phase on Visa, 45 on Mastercard.
5. If contested, it can escalate through further rounds and ultimately to network arbitration.

The important structural point is that the merchant loses the money first and argues afterwards. That asymmetry is deliberate — it protects cardholders — and it is also the reason merchants price chargeback risk into everything they do.

The window is much longer than people assume

Visa groups reason codes into four families — fraud, authorisation, processing errors and consumer disputes — and Mastercard uses an equivalent structure. Each carries its own evidence requirements and its own clock, which is why no single number describes the deadline.

Why this matters for a gift code you bought

Here is the mechanism behind codes that work for a few weeks and then stop, which is otherwise mystifying to the person holding one.

1. A reseller buys gift subscriptions with a card that is not theirs.
2. They sell the codes immediately and cheaply, because inventory bought with someone else’s money can be sold below cost.
3. You redeem the code and it works. It was a genuine gift subscription — that part was never fake.
4. Weeks or months later the real cardholder notices the charge and disputes it.
5. The purchase is reversed, the subscription behind it is revoked, and your plan stops.

At no point does anything look wrong from your side until the last step. This is why a price well below Anthropic’s own is a warning rather than a bargain: the discount is not efficiency, it is somebody else’s money, and the reversal is scheduled whether you know it or not.

Why crypto resellers exist at all

Turn the mechanism around and it explains the supply side too. If you are a merchant, every card payment you accept is provisional for months. You carry the fraud risk, the dispute-handling cost, and network penalties if too many charges are disputed.

• Digital goods delivered instantly are among the hardest categories to defend a dispute in — there is no delivery signature to produce.
• A transferable code is worse still, because the merchant cannot prove who used it.
• Crypto payments cannot be reversed by the payer, which removes that entire class of loss.
• So businesses selling exactly this kind of product gravitate to payment methods with no chargeback mechanism, and this site is one of them.

The half of this that applies to us

It would be convenient to stop at "chargebacks are why other sellers are risky". The honest version continues: when you pay us in crypto, you have no chargeback right either. There is no bank to appeal to and no reversal available if we fail to deliver.

• That protection is genuinely real on a card, and giving it up is a real cost rather than a technicality.
• What replaces it is whatever the seller has published and can be held to — a delivery window, a refund position, a way to reach a person.
• Which is why buying from anyone in this market should follow from checking those things, not from a lower price.
• And why, if your card works at all, using it is the better trade: you keep the dispute right and you pay less.

Chargeback, refund, dispute — the words are not interchangeable

Asking a merchant for a refund first is usually faster and more likely to succeed than going straight to a chargeback, and it does not stop you escalating afterwards. Going straight to the bank on a legitimate purchase can also get your own account flagged if you do it repeatedly.