[Speculative post]

Because they would lose a CC fight if they acknowledge they sent it to another address....every single time. (They couldn't easily prove they sent it to the legitimate address. This is why many companies won't ship to a different destination other than what is on file with the CC company.

They (BFL) are pretty unlucky they aren't contacting everyone they  already arranged for a different address of delivery. It no doubt opens them up big time to large losses.

If those people (if any exist) did chargebacks on their CC as the rigs got to their doorstep they would likely get a rig for free. Why no one noticed this earlier at BFL is a mystery in itself. At least that is how I understood CC policy.

The change in their policy is really no mystery at all.

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I take it, that it was to prevent the money from flowing out of the coffers. If you tell someone who wants a refund that they can't sell their position in line, then they would have to give the refund.

For BFL it would probably have been marginally better to arrange the customer to hand it off to someone else and take on the risk that the customer will do a Chargeback. (as long as they don't tell them that, there is only a slightly possibility.)

Now that the risk is probably too big to keep doing, they changed their policy.

Now they likely tell the BFL customer that they can resell it on their own, but they will have to ship to the address of the original payment. Which pushes the risk of the sale from BFL to the reseller and the buyer. Leaving BFL's hand nice and clean in the event that the reseller steals the second hand buyers money.

You can't blame them for this change, it makes perfect sense.

If things were done "right" they would just give the original buyer their money back and they would be out 1 (or more) sales. Which is inconvenient of course cause they ordered all that hardware....