I have got a couple of chargebacks for less than Rs. 200 on my ICICI Fastag account, in the past few years.

For the first one I totally panicked and raised a ticket on the online portal which requested for the RC copy to be attached. It took around a month for the amount to be returned back to my account.

This time in Nov 2023, I got another chargeback, but I missed to raise a ticket immediately. After a few weeks I got a message that my complaint on the chargeback has been raised. I was perplexed and logged into my account to look for any tickets that have been raised. And there it was, a ticket raised in my account, with the RC copy being a screen shot of a Bihar Transport department website, which allows to pull up RC details with vehicle number.

I am not sure if these are genuine faults in the system, but in any case, I think allowing the company running the toll booth to both raise a chargeback request and also automatically raising a ticket to dispute the chargeback, is a process that can be easily abused. Since it takes more than a month for the dispute to be resolved and money credited back to the Fastag account, it can be used as operating cash by someone in the system.

My guess is, this is likely the toll operators who are doing this. With a trickle of chargebacks and resolutions after a month, this can be made to look like genuine faults, but they benefit with a huge cash flow.

Probably someone needs to file an RTI requesting for the details and also if there are any penalties levied on the toll provider for incorrect chargebacks.

Searching on the Internet, I found this thread on team-bhp.com dating back to 2019 raising similar concerns. And another long wieldy article on moneylife.in giving some data on chargebacks, but nothing that suggests a proper resolution for this issue.