Reason code · American Express
Amex F10: missing imprint
F10 is an Amex fraud code. The Card Member says they didn’t make the charge, and you have no imprint of the card: it wasn’t swiped or chip-read, or a keyed sale had no manual imprint. A common cause is a phone or online sale coded as card-present.
What F10 means
F10 sits in Amex’s fraud family. The Card Member says they didn’t take part in the charge, and you haven’t provided an imprint of the card. Amex’s guide lists three causes:
- The card wasn’t swiped, or the chip wasn’t successfully read.
- A card-not-present sale was processed but not flagged as card-not-present.
- A keyed sale was made without a manual imprint of the card on the receipt.
What the customer told Amex
“I didn’t make this charge.” F10 isn’t really testing whether that’s true. It’s testing whether you had the card in front of you, and can show it.
Time limit
Amex’s guide gives Card Members (Amex’s word for cardholders) up to 120 days from the transaction date to dispute most charges, and processor guides list this fraud code at the same 120 days.
Your side of the clock is short. Amex’s own guide tells merchants to respond within 20 days. If you accept Amex through a processor such as Stripe or Square, the processor sets its own date, often a shorter one. The due date on your notice is the one that counts.
What proof matters
Amex’s guide lists two answers: proof that this was a card-not-present charge, or proof that a refund directly offsetting the charge was already processed. That’s a short list. Most of the work on F10 happens at the counter, before any dispute.
The mislabeled phone order
Here’s the one that catches service businesses. A customer calls, reads their card number, and the front desk keys it into a terminal set up for in-person sales. Now a phone order is sitting in Amex’s system as a card-present sale with no swipe, no chip read and no imprint. When the customer later denies it, that charge looks exactly like F10.
Amex’s fix is plain: identify card-not-present sales correctly, swipe or dip the card when it’s present, and take a manual imprint for keyed in-person sales.
The common mistake
Sending a signed receipt for a keyed sale and expecting it to work. F10 asks about the card’s imprint, not the customer’s signature. If the card was never read, the receipt doesn’t answer the question.
Dispute Daddy builds this for you
Upload the notice and your records. Dispute Daddy builds a response around the reason Amex actually gave, and you approve it before you submit. See how the method works.
