What Is a Credit Card Chargeback, and How Do You File One?
What a chargeback actually is
A chargeback is a formal dispute you raise with your bank to reverse a transaction, typically because of fraud, a merchant that never delivered, a duplicate charge, or a cancelled service you were still billed for. Your bank investigates and, if the dispute holds up, reverses the charge, sometimes recovering the funds from the merchant's bank in the process.
The window you actually have
Card networks generally allow disputes to be raised within 120 days of the transaction date, though individual banks sometimes set shorter internal deadlines for specific categories, so it's worth raising a dispute as soon as you spot the issue rather than waiting. Simple, well-documented cases like an obvious duplicate charge often resolve in 2 to 3 weeks; disputes involving international merchants or more complex fraud can take up to the full 120-day window.
A common real-world case
Say you cancelled a streaming subscription in March, but a ₹999 charge from the same merchant shows up on your April statement anyway. First step is the merchant: most subscription services will refund a post-cancellation charge without a fight once you point it out, since it's usually a billing-cycle timing error on their end, not an attempt to overcharge you. If the merchant doesn't respond or refuses, that's when it becomes a chargeback: you'd file it under "service cancelled" or "goods/services not as described," attach your cancellation confirmation email as evidence, and the bank takes it from there, typically with a provisional credit while it investigates. Cases like this, clean documentation, an obvious billing error, tend to resolve on the faster end of the window rather than dragging toward 120 days.
How to actually file one
- Try the merchant first. Most legitimate merchants will reverse a genuine billing error or cancel a charge on request, and it's usually faster than a formal dispute.
- Raise the dispute through your bank via the app, net banking, or customer care, selecting the correct category, fraud, goods not received, duplicate billing, or service cancelled, since the category affects what evidence you'll need.
- Provide documentation: order confirmations, communication with the merchant, proof of cancellation, or anything establishing what actually happened.
- The bank investigates, often issuing a provisional credit while it does, and the merchant's bank gets a window (commonly around 45 days) to respond and contest the dispute.
If your bank doesn't resolve the dispute to your satisfaction within a reasonable time, you can escalate it through RBI's own Complaint Management System.
What it doesn't do
Filing a chargeback doesn't affect your credit score or show up on your credit report, and Indian banks don't charge a fee for filing one. It also isn't a shortcut around buyer's remorse, a chargeback is meant for a transaction that was actually wrong, fraudulent, undelivered, or duplicated, not for a legitimate purchase you've simply changed your mind about.
