Back in the mid 2000s I was the CTO of a large player in this industry. It's not true.

The high fees are purely because supply is constrained; Visa declares certain industries "high risk" and limits merchant banks to only allow a minor percentage (IIRC, something like 20%) of their transactions to be in this category. The designation is not empirical; our chargeback rates were extremely low, especially compared to online businesses.

This designation is a political issue. Fraud is not actually the problem.