Amber McGirr is the founder of Chargeback Nerd and a chargeback consultant specializing in dispute management, issuer behavior, and card network rules. She has over a decade of experience across payments, fraud, and chargeback operations, working closely with merchants, platforms, and payments teams facing complex risk and compliance challenges.

The seed for Chargeback Nerd was planted during Amber’s time working within a major global payment facilitator and orchestration provider. While partnering directly with merchants, ISVs, and platforms, she repeatedly saw the same gap: 

Most business owners don't understand chargebacks, and no one was taking the time to teach them.

Network rules, PSP preferences, issuer behavior, and regulatory requirements were treated as assumed knowledge, with very little effort made to explain how the system actually worked or how decisions were being made.

Amber’s background spans hands-on merchant dispute operations, network-driven frameworks, and advisory roles focused on payments risk strategy. Her work centers on identifying chargeback patterns, assessing evidence quality, and interpreting how issuer automation and card network rules influence outcomes across different business models.

What distinguishes Amber’s approach is her ability to connect chargeback rules to real-world behavior. She treats chargebacks as signals, not just transactions, linking disputes back to customer experience friction, authorization issues, and refund and cancellation design. This allows merchants and platforms to focus on preventing unwinnable disputes while improving recovery where it is realistically achievable.

While Amber advises on fraud and broader payments risk, her core expertise is chargebacks. She is particularly focused on reducing invalid disputes, improving representment strategy, and helping merchants work within card network rules without wasting time or resources on low-value fights.