For the record what kind of chargeback are you initiating, and why does it have to go through visa rather than the bank who issued you the card? Unauthorized card-not-present transaction initiated by a third party? Some cbs are harder than others to get ruled in your favor, but the one where a criminal takes your card and uses it without your knowledge is by far the easiest one to get awarded. It involves one call to your bank and you get a new card, all fraudulent charges reversed.

If your bank doesn’t want to honor the request yes you’ll have to contact the payment network (visa/mastercard) and I’m sure there’s someone in this thread who has experienced that for an unauthorized transaction chargeback but it’s exceedingly rare.

Merchant error chargebacks , on the other hand… very different situation.

The US makes chargebacks exceptionally easy. Non-Americans have a much less useful credit card system, which is why debit cards are more common in most of Europe.

Merchant fraud this time. Done through the (soon-to-be-ex) bank but they brought up the charge from Visa.

It’s possible that my current bank is particularly bad at this, as they are bad at everything else. I have had the runaround with merchant error and stolen card number chargebacks with other banks though.