This was back in the 1990s, so things may have changed since then.
When a customer reported fraudulent charges, unless they believed it involved a family member, the cardmember was left completely out of it and never informed of any further investigation.
Only if the case was $2000 or more did it get assigned to an investigator (me).
If it was from a business that we had problems with before, we would refer it to our Merchant Fraud dept. (I didn't work there, so I don't know what their procedures were, but I know that we routinely cut off dealing with problematic merchants, and in some cases worked with LE to get them prosecuted, but going that far was pretty rare).
I would pull the tickets to see if there was an obvious problem with the sale that the merchant could have seen. If so, we would process a chargeback to the merchant for the sale. In order to do that we would tell the cardmember that they needed to send us a physical letter disputing the sale. This was part of the agreement we had with the merchant to do business with them. If they violated certain policies, they would have to eat the costs of the sale.
All in all, most cases were closed with no suspect and no recovery. However, overall, fraud was a fairly small portion of company losses compared with defaulting cardmembers. (Deadbeats, bankruptcies and the like). Our collections department was easily 20 times the size of the security dept.
So, to answer your question....yes and no. As investigators, we took our jobs really seriously, and did our best to find suspects and see justice served out of a sense of professional pride. (Many were former LE people, or wanna be LE people, not me, I just kind of stumbled into the position, but I did put my best efforts into it.).
However, the company didn't really care, as long as the numbers stayed relatively low.
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