Fraud Prevention

As the Merchant of Record, Neon is the legal seller on every transaction and carries the fraud and dispute liability for all transactions, so that publishers can focus on building great games.

Neon takes on the following responsibilities for the publisher::

Disputes: A dispute is when a player contacts their payment provider and claims that the transaction was illegitimate. In addition to the financial losses, disputes can push merchants into card-scheme monitoring programs and threaten their ability to process cards in extreme cases.
False declines: A false decline is when the Merchant of Record declines a transaction as fraudulent even though it was actually legitimate. If this happens a player can’t pay, is getting frustrated and potentially churns. Getting the balance right is the core of Neon's fraud value to publishers.

Dispute monitoring programs

The card networks track every merchant's fraud and dispute activity and enforce their thresholds. If a merchant crosses these thresholds, it enters a monitoring program, which escalates fines, requires mandatory remediation, and removes card acceptance if the high dispute rates persist. Since Neon is the Merchant of Record (MoR), chargeback ratios apply at the Neon account level, allowing individual publishers with temporary spikes to stay protected by Neon's overall good standing.

The critical programs for online card acceptance are:

Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP). As of the June 2025 rollout, Visa consolidated its older Dispute Monitoring (VDMP) and Fraud Monitoring (VFMP) programs into a single VAMP ratio that combines fraud (TC40) and non-fraud disputes (TC15) against total transactions. The merchant "Excessive" threshold triggers at 1.5%.
Mastercard Excessive Chargeback Program (ECM/HECM). ECM triggers at 100–299 chargebacks and a 1.5%–2.99% ratio measured over two months; HECM triggers at ≥300 chargebacks and ≥3%. Fines escalate from ~US$1,000 into six figures, plus issuer recovery assessments. A separate Excessive Fraud Merchant (EFM) program targets card-not-present fraud where 3DS usage is low.
MATCH list. A merchant terminated for excessive chargebacks or fraud can be placed on Mastercard's MATCH list, which effectively blacklists them from obtaining new processing for up to five years. Neon absorbs this risk entirely for their publishers.

Losses through false declines

False declines are legitimate transactions blocked or flagged as fraud (false positives). They are the quieter, larger loss. Industry-wide, false declines cost merchants far more than actual fraud does, because every wrongly rejected purchase is lost revenue plus a frustrated customer who may not come back.

Gaming makes this worse. Signals that generic e-commerce fraud tools treat as suspicious are normal in gaming, including a cardholder name that doesn't match the player's gamertag, high purchase velocity during a session or a new account buying immediately. Standard fraud tools are calibrated for general e-commerce and produce exactly these kinds of false positives in our context.

The trade-off is explicit and unavoidable: tightening controls to protect the dispute ratio increases false declines and hurts conversion; loosening them to protect conversion raises fraud and dispute exposure. Neon's premise is to move that frontier: catch more true fraud without rejecting more good players rather than just sliding along it.

How Neon helps

Richer fraud signal than competitors.

Publishers can pass Neon 14+ gaming-specific fraud signals at checkout:

Signal	Description
creationTime	The time the customer created their account.
socialSignType	The social sign-in method used by the customer (e.g., Google, Apple, Facebook).
platform	The device or platform the customer is using (e.g., iOS, Android, Windows).
sessionCount	The number of times the customer has opened or used the app.
levelInApp	The customer’s current level or progression in the app.
followersInApp	How many followers or social connections the customer has in the app.
onLatestAppVersion	Whether the customer is using the latest version of the app.
hasLinkedSocialAccount	Whether the customer has connected a social media account (e.g., Facebook, Discord) to their game profile.
finishedGameSetup	Whether the customer has completed the game’s initial setup or onboarding process.
averageMonthlySpend	Average monthly spend of the customer.
latestLoginIp	An object containing IP-related information from the customer’s latest login.
ipAddress	The IP address from which the customer logged in.
country	The country the IP address is located in, using ISO 3166-1 code (e.g., "US", "BR").
city	The city where the IP address is located.
region	The region (e.g., state or province) associated with the IP address.

These behavioral signals help us distinguish a real returning player from a stolen card far more accurately than transactional data alone, directly reducing false declines.

Platform-level protection of the dispute ratio. Because scheme ratios accrue to Neon, Neon monitors them continuously across all publishers and mitigates the risk early. This is protection an individual publisher processing on their own would have to build and staff themselves.

Liability absorption. As the MoR, Neon carries the regulatory and card-network liability so publishers do not have to build and maintain fraud infrastructure, negotiate with schemes, or manage monitoring-program exposure themselves. Publishers get enterprise-grade fraud protection tuned for gaming without standing up a risk team.