What does a Disputes & Fraud FTE own?
A Disputes & Fraud FTE on ftes.ai owns a store's chargebacks and its exposure to first-party fraud, in the Finance department of the e-commerce org chart. It is judged on dollars recovered and the dispute ratio, and accountable for one outcome: every contestable dispute contested, with evidence, before the deadline. The gap between the disputes a store could win and the disputes it actually contests is, at most stores, a staffing gap rather than a strategy, and this role closes it.
It does not own the payment relationship, the fraud-prevention tools at checkout, or the decision to block a customer. Those stay with the owner and the processor.
What goes into an evidence pack?
For each dispute, the Disputes & Fraud FTE reads the order, the shipment's carrier scans including delivery photo where the carrier provides one, the customer's order and claim history, the policy the customer agreed to at checkout, and the support correspondence on the order, and assembles them into the format the processor's dispute response expects. It adds a one-paragraph summary of why the dispute is or is not contestable under the processor's reason code.
The pack is assembled as soon as the dispute arrives, not the day before the deadline. The deadline is tracked on the dispute itself, and the proposal reaches the owner with time to read it.
How does it decide whether to contest?
The Disputes & Fraud FTE proposes contest when the evidence addresses the reason code, such as a delivery scan with photo against an item-not-received claim, and accept when it does not, or when the owner's policy says a dispute below a value is not worth the fee and the ratio. The proposal states the evidence it relies on and the evidence it lacks. The owner approves, edits the response, or overrides the recommendation, and the decision is logged.
It also proposes refund-before-dispute rules: where a customer's complaint is likely to become a dispute that costs more than the order, a refund inside the Order Support FTE's limit avoids the ratio hit. The rule is the owner's to set.
How are fraud patterns handled?
First-party fraud, sometimes called friendly fraud, is a customer disputing a legitimate purchase. The Disputes & Fraud FTE watches for the patterns that suggest it: repeat item-not-received claims from one address, delivered-not-received clusters on one carrier lane that are really a delivery problem, refund-then-dispute on the same order. It shows the pattern with the orders and the evidence, as a finding for a person to judge.
It never labels a customer a fraudster and never blocks an account or a payment method on its own. The finding may lead the owner to require signature on delivery for an address, or to contest a claim the FTE would otherwise have proposed accepting; those are the owner's decisions.
What does the Disputes & Fraud FTE never do?
It never submits a dispute response without approval at Level 0, never issues a refund, and never blocks a customer at any autonomy level. It never invents evidence: a pack that lacks a delivery scan says so, and the proposal is to accept. It never reports a dispute as won until the processor says so, and never reports recovery as a projection.
Once the approval record on routine, well-evidenced item-not-received responses is long and clean, the owner can promote that class to submit without a gate; contesting anything with a customer complaint attached stays gated.
What does it report, and how honestly?
The Disputes & Fraud FTE reports open disputes and their deadlines, packs submitted, outcomes as the processor reports them, dollars recovered, the dispute ratio against the processor's threshold, and the patterns it flagged with the owner's decision on each. Recovery is reported as won disputes' value, not as the value of everything contested.
It reports the disputes it recommended accepting, and why, because a high win rate built by contesting only the easy ones is not the number the owner should manage to; recovery across all disputes is.
How does it work with the other roles, and in which tools?
The Disputes & Fraud FTE reads disputes from Shopify Payments, Stripe, PayPal or Adyen, orders and scans from the store platform and shipping tools, and support threads from the help desk the Order Support FTE works in. It hands delivery-lane clusters to the Logistics Officer FTE, and takes the refund limit it must respect from the Order Support FTE's policy. Its dispute ratio and recoveries appear on the Chief of Staff FTE's page and in the value ledger.
It is one of the fastest roles to show a measured result, because the evidence for the next thirty days of disputes already exists in the store.