Once 100 chargebacks are exceeded on a MID in any given month, Visa/Mastercard starts to monitor the company. If the operator is unable to reduce the chargebacks quickly the free trials MIDs get shut down, preventing the operator from harming more consumers…or so you would think. (The reality is that civil penalties or FTC action is like whack-a-mole with these operators, they just rebrand and keep doing it over and over again. Only criminal actions shut these operations down permanently, like we saw in the Jeremy Johnson case.)
Load balancing is made possible by acquiring and using multiple MIDs, which are then used to spread transactions across to stay below chargeback thresholds. In the HNB case, it appears that HNB utilized dozens of MIDs to load balance its transactions. These MIDs were possibly linked to different URLs via subsidiary companies, yet may have been used to operate 1 single product, i.e. Garcinia Wow. With transactions spread across dozens of these businesses, and chargebacks below the 100 count on each business, it is likely that HNB stayed off the radars of Visa/Mastercard.
