Inside the Nuvei Order: $4.85 Million, a Merchant Ban and a 60-Day Investigation Clock

By Herald Express Desk

A proposed federal court order would require payment processor Nuvei to turn merchant-risk review into a continuing compliance system, not a one-time onboarding check. The agreement filed in Arizona combines a $4.85 million monetary judgment with a ban on processing certain tech-support sales, monthly chargeback monitoring, quarterly test calls for covered merchants and a 60-day deadline for resolving investigations.

The Federal Trade Commission says the measures settle allegations that Nuvei companies processed payments for merchants they knew or should have known were deceiving consumers. Nuvei and the other defendants neither admit nor deny the complaint’s allegations, except for facts needed to establish the court’s jurisdiction. The proposed order still requires approval by the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona.

The money is material, but the more durable consequence is the operating rulebook. It defines which merchants receive enhanced scrutiny, which warning signs require investigation and when the processor must stop handling transactions. That makes the filing useful beyond this case: it shows what federal enforcers expect a processor to document when chargebacks, complaints, ownership questions and sales practices point in the same direction.

What changed

The FTC filed its complaint on September 3, 2026, under case number 2:26-cv-06306. A consent motion and proposed order followed on September 4. The docket lists U.S. District Judge Krissa M. Lanham as the presiding judge. Because the court has not yet entered the order, its obligations are best described as proposed rather than final.

If entered, the order would impose a $4.85 million judgment jointly and severally on the defendants. Their counsel already holds that amount in escrow, according to the document, and payment would be due within seven days of entry. The FTC may use the fund for consumer redress and related administration; money that cannot be used for that relief may ultimately go to the U.S. Treasury under the order’s terms.

The settlement would also prohibit Nuvei from processing payments for sellers of technical-support products or services that market through telemarketing or device-security pop-ups. A second ban covers merchants the company knows or has reason to know are on Mastercard’s MATCH list for specified reasons, including excessive chargebacks, fraud, laundering, merchant collusion or illegal transactions.

Separate provisions would bar false or misleading statements used to obtain merchant accounts and tactics intended to defeat fraud monitoring. The order names several examples: distributing transaction volume across multiple accounts or billing descriptors, using shell companies to obtain more accounts, splitting one sale into smaller transactions, and using early refunds to suppress chargeback rates without examining why customers disputed the transactions.

The allegations behind the settlement

The complaint centers on payment processing for Reimage, an offshore technical-support business that the FTC separately sued in 2024. The agency alleges that from January 2017 through July 2023, Nuvei companies processed more than 310,000 Reimage sales with net sales of $28 million through accounts opened in the names of Reimage and SafeCharge Digital. It alleges another 89,000 Reimage sales totaling $3.8 million through accounts opened for payment intermediary Upclick.

Those two figures add to approximately 399,000 transactions and $31.8 million in net sales. The arithmetic is a Herald Express calculation from the complaint’s separate totals, not a separate finding by the court. The complaint says more than 41,000 transactions through the Reimage and SafeCharge Digital accounts, plus more than 12,000 through the Upclick accounts, involved consumers and issuing banks in the United States.

The FTC alleges Nuvei received consumer complaints and refund requests, saw excessive chargeback levels and continued processing through several account structures. It further alleges that merchant accounts and billing descriptors were used in ways that obscured the relationship among the seller, intermediary and processor. These are allegations in a civil complaint; the defendants’ stipulation expressly says they do not admit or deny them.

The agency also names other merchant types in the complaint, including sellers of business opportunities with allegedly false earnings claims, businesses accused of impersonating tax authorities and merchants previously terminated by other processors or banks. The settlement is therefore not limited to a single seller or one technical-support campaign.

Who would receive enhanced screening

The proposed order creates a category called a “Covered Client.” It includes merchants using outbound telemarketing; merchants selling technical support, consumer software, business opportunities, business coaching, negative-option offers, health-related products or debt-relief services; and clients named during the previous 10 years in specified federal or state enforcement matters involving fraud or unfair, deceptive or abusive practices.

Before onboarding such a client, Nuvei would have to collect and assess more than a business name and bank account. The document calls for information about the goods or services, sales methods, principals and majority owners, trade names, websites and physical locations. It also requires prior processor relationships, merchant-account information where available, five months of chargeback or ACH-return history and six months of processing statements for merchants with a prior processing record.

The screening must look behind what the applicant supplies. Nuvei would have to review complete websites, current marketing material and telemarketing scripts, examine processing statements, and search for relevant public information. The point is to determine whether the merchant’s offer, billing authority, refund terms or sales representations indicate deception or an unfair practice before the payment relationship begins.

The thresholds that trigger an investigation

For covered clients, monitoring would occur at least monthly. That includes reviewing websites from an internet address not associated with Nuvei, checking consumer complaints and chargeback requests, examining transaction patterns and rates, searching public records and retaining representative marketing material. Test calls would be required at least quarterly.

The order sets a specific investigation trigger. If a client exceeds a 1.0% monthly chargeback rate and has more than 75 chargebacks in any two of the previous six months—whether in one account or across its accounts—Nuvei must promptly investigate. For covered clients using ACH debits, a second trigger applies when the total return rate exceeds 2.5% with more than 40 returned transactions in any two of the previous six months.

An investigation would require more than asking the merchant for reassurance. The listed steps include updating ownership and advertising information, checking customer authorization, contacting financial institutions and Better Business Bureaus, conducting test shopping or calls, reviewing sites from an outside internet address, searching for enforcement actions and identifying every processing account the client maintains with Nuvei.

Once an investigation starts, the processor has 60 days to stop transactions and close the accounts unless it produces a written report establishing by clear and convincing evidence that the relevant business practices are not deceptive or unfair under the FTC Act or the Telemarketing Sales Rule. The same closing rule applies to ordinary clients that cross the chargeback trigger, not only merchants already designated as covered.

Why it matters for the payments industry

Payment processors occupy a critical position between merchants, acquiring banks, card networks and customers. They do not make a merchant’s sales pitch, but their systems allow the merchant to collect money. Enforcement disputes therefore turn on when a processor’s distance from the underlying sale ends and responsibility for warning signs begins.

A joint statement from FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson and Commissioner Mark Meador says the Commission should have to establish that a processor knew, should have known or consciously avoided knowing that a merchant was violating the law. The statement rejects a strict-liability approach under which a processor could be liable merely because a bad merchant slipped through otherwise reasonable controls.

That distinction is consequential. It protects legitimate processing from an impossible promise that no client will ever commit fraud, while making documented warning signs central to liability. The Nuvei complaint alleges not an isolated oversight but a pattern involving complaints, high chargebacks, internal concern and account arrangements over time. Whether those allegations are proven is a separate question; the proposed settlement avoids a trial between the FTC and the defendants.

The order also treats fragmented accounts as an analytical problem. Chargebacks calculated only account by account can look lower when a merchant’s volume is spread across several identifiers. Requiring both individual-account and aggregate calculations is designed to show the processor the merchant-level risk rather than a collection of smaller numbers.

What consumers should know

The filing does not establish an immediate claim process or promise a particular payment to any individual. The FTC would control the redress fund if the order is entered. Consumers should rely on instructions published through official FTC channels and should be wary of anyone demanding a fee or financial information to release settlement money.

For disputed card charges, the order’s monitoring framework explains why complaints and chargebacks matter: together they can reveal a sales practice that is not obvious from a merchant application. Consumers still need to use the dispute procedures and deadlines provided by their card issuer rather than wait for an enforcement case.

The case fits a broader line of FTC action involving technical-support sellers and the companies that process their payments. Herald Express has also examined how fraud can begin with a fake customer-care contact and how regulatory claims should be separated from measured outcomes. The common lesson is that a stated safeguard is not the same thing as evidence that the safeguard worked.

What happens next

The next formal step is for the Arizona federal court to decide whether to enter the stipulated order. The publicly listed docket showed the complaint, case assignment and consent motion through September 4. Until a judge acts, descriptions of permanent obligations and payment timing remain conditional.

If the order is entered, the immediate markers will be the seven-day payment deadline and the start of implementation work. Nuvei would then have 60 days to review current clients for covered-client status, while the permanent screening, monitoring, investigation and account-closing rules would govern the conduct specified in the order. A compliance report would be due one year after entry.

For the wider industry, the most important question is whether later FTC cases use the same knowledge standard and similarly concrete monitoring duties. The joint statement frames the case as a way to distinguish a processor that reasonably misses concealed misconduct from one that disregards accumulating warning signs. That test—and the records needed to satisfy it—may prove more significant than the settlement amount.

Sources

• FTC complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona
• Proposed stipulated order
• Joint statement by FTC Chairman Ferguson and Commissioner Meador
• Federal court docket summary
• Law360 report on the settlement filing
• Paypedia analysis of the screening regime

Image: Editorial illustration of payment-screening and fraud-risk controls.

Story synopsis gathered from: Federal Trade Commission — source