American Express and Discover are similar in two ways that differentiate them from Visa and MasterCard. First, AmEx and Discover act as both the card network and card issuing bank, whereas Visa and MasterCard do not issue credit cards directly. Second, like Discover American Expresses uses alpha-numeric chargeback reason codes. American Express uses letters to categorize each reason code by chargeback description or reason. For example, fraud related chargebacks begin with F or FR, processing error chargebacks begin with P, authorization chargebacks begin with A and cardholder dispute chargebacks begin with C. Whereas the other card brands have done away with retrieval requests, American Express still has a few of these which they call inquiries.

Fraud Related AmEx Chargebacks