What makes a merchant high-risk
There is no single list. Each acquirer has its own risk policy, and the schemes add categories of their own. The usual factors:
- Sector: gambling, adult content, pharmaceuticals, crypto, subscriptions with trials
- Delivery long after payment, as with tickets, travel and pre-orders
- A history of high chargeback or fraud rates
- Card-not-present sales across borders
- A new business, or owners with a poor processing record
- Activity that needs a licence in the buyer's country
How Mastercard treats high-risk sectors
Mastercard's Security Rules and Procedures of 4 August 2026 require an acquirer to register certain merchant types with Mastercard, under its Specialty Merchant Registration Programme. The list includes non-face-to-face adult content, gambling, pharmaceutical and tobacco merchants, skill games, high-risk cyberlockers, high-risk securities merchants, cryptocurrency merchants (MCC 6051) and negative option billing merchants selling physical products. The same manual recommends that acquirers repeat their screening of merchants in those categories every year.
What the label means for a payments business
For the merchant, the label sets the price and the terms: a rolling reserve, slower settlement, volume caps and tighter monitoring. For a payment service provider or payment facilitator, it decides which acquirers will take the portfolio at all, and what onboarding checks it has to run. A crypto on-ramp or exchange that takes Mastercard payments falls into a registered category.
High-risk merchant or MATCH-listed merchant?
- MATCH-listed merchant
- A merchant whose account an acquirer terminated for a listed reason. High-risk describes a category of business, while a MATCH listing records a history.
- Merchant in a monitoring programme
- A merchant whose measured chargebacks or fraud passed a scheme's thresholds. Any merchant can end up there, whatever its sector.
Where a high-risk merchant shows up in a platform
Modules that do the work
- Merchant onboardingBusiness sign-up, verification and underwriting, from application to first payment.
- Fraud & riskReal-time fraud scoring, limits and case management, with the risk engines you already trust.
- Card acquiringCard acceptance on the phone, in store and online, through the acquirer you choose.
- KYC / AMLIdentity checks, screening and ongoing monitoring, with the verification provider you choose.
Platforms that need it
Guides that go deeper
- How to become a PSP or a payment facilitatorGateway, acquirer, payment facilitator or payment institution: where the licence line falls, how the card schemes register payment facilitators, what merchant KYB demands, and the UK and UAE rules.
- Crypto on-ramps: how a buy widget works and who needs the licenceHow a fiat-to-crypto buy widget works inside another company's app, who the regulated party is, and the rules on UK promotions, card fraud, the Travel Rule, MiCA and VARA.
Where it is written
The laws and standards this page's facts come from.
General information, not legal advice: what applies to you depends on your services and your market.