What evidence wins a card chargeback for AI-delivered services?
Banks decide chargebacks on documents, and services lose when the documents are chat screenshots. Review the receipt and actual deliverable before accepting a handover.
Scope: general information about organising a response, not legal or financial advice. Chargeback rules come from your payment provider and the card networks; their deadlines and categories govern your case.
A chargeback reverses the burden: the client has the money back already, and you are applying to be re-paid. The reviewer reads hundreds of files; yours wins by being legible. Four documents, in the order the reviewer checks them. The agreement, showing the service, the price, and the terms the buyer accepted. The delivery record, showing the work itself: steps, saved results, and timestamps that were fixed when the work ran, not assembled for the dispute.
The acceptance record is the document services cases usually lack. A handover the client opened and accepted, with the decision and its date on the record, answers the standard claims (not received, not as described, cancelled and delivered anyway) in the reviewer's own categories. Where acceptance was never recorded, the delivery record and the correspondence carry more weight, and the packet should say plainly what exists rather than inflate it.
Assemble the packet the day the chargeback lands, from the job's records folder, and submit inside the provider's deadline with days to spare. Then fix the system that produced the gap: acceptance recorded at delivery is a one-line habit that converts future chargebacks from archaeology into forwarding.
Template: the chargeback defense packet
Cover page: chargeback reference, amount, your one-paragraph summary. Exhibit A: the agreement (contract, checkout terms, or proposal acceptance). Exhibit B: the delivery record: handover link plus a printed step list with timestamps; receipts checkable at https://zambo.dev/verify/ . Exhibit C: the acceptance record (decision, decider, date) or a dated note that acceptance was not recorded, with the delivery correspondence instead. Exhibit D: description match: the brief against the delivered steps, item by item. Exhibit E: correspondence after delivery, full thread. Submit as one file where the provider allows; name exhibits exactly as the cover page lists them.
Worked example
Exhibit B and C in one public object: https://zambo.dev/handover/45434a17-4afc-486a-9646-e689bcee4297 shows a delivered job with its steps and the client's recorded acceptance. A packet whose core exhibits open like this gives the reviewer the whole case in the first two documents.
Frequently asked questions
The client claims they never received the service. What answers that?
The delivery record plus the acceptance record: the steps and timestamps show the work, and the client's own recorded decision shows receipt. If acceptance was never recorded, the delivery correspondence and any use the client made of the deliverable carry the argument.
How fast do I have to respond?
Your provider sets the deadline and it is short, commonly days to a few weeks. Treat the packet as a same-week task; the records folder per job exists so assembly is an hour, not a search.
Does a receipt prove the service was good?
No. A receipt proves the saved result was not changed since it was saved, and the packet uses it for delivery and timing. Quality is argued in Exhibit D, your description match, from the work itself.
By Brennan Zambo, founder of Zambo.
Last verified: 2026-10-17.
Try a handover
A handover gives your client one proof link with verifiable receipts to review, then Accept or Flag.
try it: say 'use zambo to hand this over to <client>' in your ai