Watching Bruce's show from yesterday covering Dwolla's emails.
Their "answers" to his direct questions are downright despicable, and even the irrelevant garbage they are saying is dishonest.
Compare Bruce's argument that all they'd have to do would be to publish an e-mail they'd sent to Tradehill informing them about the transaction reversals with (a) their initial statement that they can't release details about specific customers or transactions and (b) Bruce's second e-mail to them. (It's revealing that they haven't quoted any concrete policy of informing customers about reversed transactions but unsurprising that they won't publish private e-mails.)
And their CEO thinks it's funny to mock Bitcoin investors? Who are making up almost his entire customer base.
Finally managed to find
the actual article Bruce was referring to - that was a bit of a pain.
Edit:How would it matter if there's a delivery of a product that's traceable? The claims in this case aren't that TradeHill didn't do what they said they were going to do, the claim is that the original transfer is unauthorized. The situation would be precisely the same if TradeHill had shipped them a physical product.
It matters because Tradehill were offering a service that had the equivalent of a big neon sign on it reading "ideal for laundering stolen money". Of course, they should've reacted by refusing to do business with Bitcoin marketplaces from the start.
Even if the physical product could be recovered, someone would still be out the costs of preparing, shipping, and restocking the product. There would still be the issue of whether Dwolla or TradeHill eats that loss. Dwolla can't afford to eat that loss on $0.25 per transaction. And TradeHill can't on .5% commissions. And there's always the chance the physical product couldn't be recovered.
The riskier fraud is and the harder it is to make money on it, the less likely it is to happen.