Runa is directing gift card resellers’ attention to losses that appear after an apparently successful sale. In its July 1 commentary, the payout company describes stolen-card purchases, account takeover, refund abuse and fabricated claims as distinct problems that can leave a reseller without either the sale proceeds or recoverable card value. [S01]

That is a margin problem as well as a security problem. A reseller may earn only the difference between its acquisition price and selling price. Reversing an entire funded purchase can therefore consume the earnings from several legitimate transactions, even before staff spend time on the dispute.

A supplier argues for controls around delivery

Runa began in 2016 as WeGift, an API-based digital gift card business, and later expanded into other payouts. [S02] It supplies part of the infrastructure through which these transactions move, giving its fraud argument a commercial interest as well as an operational basis.

The July article recommends connecting order records, delivery evidence and dispute deadlines rather than relying only on payment authorization. It also discusses reviewing unusual account and refund behaviour after a purchase. [S01]

Authorization and delivery answer different questions. Permission to charge a payment card does not establish that the account holder intended the purchase, while a delivery record does not necessarily settle a claim about subsequent use. The vulnerable gap is the handoff between payment acceptance, provision of a redeemable code and any later reversal.

Runa’s Assure product page describes IP restrictions, account permissions, order limits, suspicious-user analysis and multi-factor authentication. It says this functionality is built into its platform. [S03]

These controls show what the company sells around fulfillment. They are not a promise that every dispute will be prevented or reimbursed. The public description does not provide a universal contractual guarantee covering a reseller’s losses.

The transaction amount is not the handling cost

The financial benchmarks also need precise labels. Mastercard’s chargeback analysis identifies $110 as the average US chargeback amount in its 2025 research with Datos Insights. The page separately cites $128 in merchant handling costs from later research with Javelin. These describe different measurements and should not be substituted for one another. [S04]

Neither average establishes the loss on a particular gift card order. That depends on the disputed amount, whether value can be recovered, fees, staff effort and the result of the dispute. A benchmark is useful context, but it cannot stand in for a reseller’s own ledger.

Faster delivery makes responsibility more important

Gift card fulfillment is attractive because it can deliver usable value quickly. The same speed can shorten the interval in which a suspicious transaction can be stopped before the code is spent.

The commercial tradeoff is therefore not simply stricter controls versus more sales. An operator also has to avoid blocking legitimate reward recipients or creating repeated support work. Better records can help distinguish those cases, but collecting records and making an accurate decision remain separate tasks.

Runa’s intervention is a pitch to evaluate payout infrastructure on retained revenue and operational reliability, rather than code delivery alone. Its evidence supports examining the whole transaction chain; it does not establish a single fraud rate, loss guarantee or remedy for every reseller.