Another alternative would be freezing money transfers for 30 days or so. Or use a payment processor that is used to deal with high risk websites (for example, CCBill).
> The uncomfortable truth is that Gittip, Balanced, and our legitimate users are financially incentivized to turn a blind eye to laundering, because we have benefitted and are benefitting from it.
That's only true until you start getting chargebacks.
> That's only true until you start getting chargebacks.
There are compliance ramifications of permitting money laundering, but collusion isn't always money laundering. Here's a few different scenarios:
1. Legitimate money laundering where someone is trying to obfuscate the origin of the money for some illicit reason. The ramifications of permitting or not having strong enough systems to prevent money laundering results in being shutdown. That's a bigger incentive than financial loss
2. Fraud where someone is trying to get cash off of someone else's card. This is the number one form of fraud on a marketplace and, by far, the hardest to catch. This is where the incentive is financial due to chargebacks
3. Cash advance where a marketplace has set their fees low (sometimes even lower than the fees Balanced charges) and someone is incentivized to get money off their card or simply get miles/points. Venmo and a lot of similar services experienced would get targeted by this form of collusion when they didn't charge any fees. This should be prevented due to card network (Amex, Visa, MC, Discover) policies, but they generally won't result in a chargeback
> The uncomfortable truth is that Gittip, Balanced, and our legitimate users are financially incentivized to turn a blind eye to laundering, because we have benefitted and are benefitting from it.
That's only true until you start getting chargebacks.