Note: this expands on MFJ’s September 9 coverage of the Humboldt settlement, adding the Nuvei case and what the two together signal for processors.
Key takeaway: Payment processors and acquiring banks should expect scrutiny to extend beyond the onboarding decision. Chargeback-rate monitoring, ownership verification, and BIN-assignment practices are now plausible enforcement targets. They’re no longer just theoretical best practices.
Two proposed Federal Trade Commission settlements from September 2026 are raising the bar for merchant screening. Global payment processor Nuvei agreed to pay $4.85 million in consumer redress. Humboldt Merchant Services agreed to pay $12 million in consumer redress. Neither company admitted wrongdoing, and both cases remain pending before a federal court, according to a PYMNTS legal analysis.
The FTC alleged Nuvei opened and maintained processing accounts for merchants it knew or should have known were engaged in deception. That included tech support scams that took millions of dollars from consumers. The agency’s complaint specifically cites more than $30 million in consumer payments Nuvei processed for an offshore tech support scam called Reimage between 2017 and 2023.
Days later, the FTC accused Humboldt Merchant Services of a different kind of failure. The agency said Humboldt processed payments for more than 1,000 shell merchants used as fronts for companies engaged in unauthorized billing. Those sham merchants generated chargebacks at rates the FTC said were almost 10 times what card brands consider excessive.
The proposed Nuvei order lays out granular ongoing-monitoring requirements. The company must calculate chargeback rates at least monthly for every client. It must investigate any client that exceeds both a 1% monthly chargeback rate and 75 chargebacks in any two of the preceding six months. For merchants under enhanced screening, Nuvei must also collect five months of chargeback data and, where available, six months of processing statements, along with information on ownership, principals, and prior terminations by other processors for excessive chargebacks or fraud.
PYMNTS Intelligence research cited alongside the analysis found 57% of executives at payment-heavy firms reported rising fraud attempts in the past year. Sixty-five percent planned to strengthen identity verification in the next 12 months. A related study found 57% of middle-market companies typically detect payment fraud only after settlement. Among that same group, companies that caught fraud earlier used verification tools far more often: 81% used instant bank verification, versus 47% of late detectors, and 76% used open banking-based ownership checks, versus 35% of late detectors.
Why it matters: The specificity in the Nuvei order (exact chargeback-rate thresholds, a monthly monitoring cadence, multi-month data-collection rules) shows what the FTC considered adequate screening in this one case. It’s not a formal industry-wide standard, but it does signal where the agency’s expectations are heading: past a one-time onboarding check and toward continuous, quantified monitoring of merchant behavior after approval.