Ideally, they'd be doing their job and screening these people before they paid for a domain and started hosting phishing sites or malware, but you know, assumin

Ideally, they'd be doing their job and screening these people before they paid for a domain and started hosting phishing sites or malware, but you know, assuming they were catching these issues proactively and basically as soon as the payment was processed I'd be okay with them taking the money before shutting the domain down. Sure, it'd still be a company profiting from stolen money, but if it can't be returned it might as well be wasted. I think the issue is that as soon as scammers realized they were throwing their money away they'd stop buying up .US domains and find some other means to trick people. Probably just using other TLDs and/or registrars which means GoDaddy loses their income stream either way.