Every day, billions of dollars move through the global payments system as people buy things online. And every day, a portion of those transactions gets reversed. Not through fraud in the traditional sense, but through disputes: a cardholder tells their bank they don’t recognize a charge, or that a service wasn’t as described, and the money often comes back to them almost immediately.
Multiplied across the entire e-commerce economy, that adds up to an estimated $125 billion a year. It’s a leak most consumers never think about, and most of fintech rarely discusses. In the AI era, however, as users continue to delegate AI agents to conduct financial transactions online, it is becoming the latest hurdle global payment companies need to overcome.
Ofir Tahor, co-founder and CEO of Justt, has spent the past six years building a company around that gap. His explanation of the problem starts with its age. “This is a mechanism created about 60, 70 years ago,” Tahor said, describing how card networks originally designed chargebacks to protect cardholders in a world of physical stores and mail-order catalogs. A customer could go straight to their bank rather than the merchant, flag a transaction as unrecognized, and get reimbursed while the burden of proof shifted entirely onto the business to explain why it should keep the money.
Tahor explained that perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the industry is how almost nothing else in e-commerce still works this way. “If you take companies like Shopify, which did a revolution in the e-commerce world, and Stripe, which did a revolution in the payment processor world, chargebacks stayed behind,” he said. Checkout, fulfillment, customer support, and fraud screening have all moved to real-time, largely automated systems.
But dispute resolution remains a paperwork exercise: a merchant compiles documentation, sends it to their payment processor, which forwards it to the cardholder’s issuing bank, like Chase, Citibank, or Wells Fargo, where a human being reviews it and makes a call. “It’s still very manual-operated,” Tahor said. “It’s somehow stayed behind in comparison to many other processes within e-commerce.”
The consequence is a phenomenon known as ‘friendly fraud’: cases where a legitimate transaction gets disputed anyway, whether through genuine confusion or deliberate manipulation of a system stacked in the cardholder’s favor. It’s now the second most common type of fraud globally, and as the ability for agents to buy things themselves only speeds up, Tahor doesn’t expect it to slow down. “It’s easy to report a chargeback, and it’s becoming easier,” he said.
The data backs this up. Mastercard’s 2025 State of Chargebacks report, based on research from Datos Insights, forecasts global chargeback volume growing 24% from 2025 to 2028, reaching 324 million transactions annually. It’s a trajectory that was already straining a decades-old system before AI-driven commerce entered the picture at all.
The argument that clamping down on friendly fraud will be a net positive for the ecosystem and, in turn, the consumer, is the origin story behind Justt’s name. “It’s from the word ‘justice’, in order to create balance in the ecosystem,” Tahor said. Even though it may sound like the company is out to protect Big Business, it is an attempt to build a system that helps merchants keep money they’re owed while still returning money to cardholders when they’re right. In that world, everyone wins because consumers aren’t left paying those costs.
Justt was founded in 2020 and has since raised $100 million. It works with more than 250 global enterprise merchants and over 80,000 small businesses, and was named to Forbes’ 2026 Fintech 50 list this spring, the first chargeback-focused company to make the list. It shows that chargeback management, long treated as a back-office cost center, is being recognized as core financial infrastructure in its own right.
