The primary goal is to keep stolen money out of Gittip. The secondary goal is to recover stolen money once it's inside of Gittip. There are other kinds of fraud

The primary goal is to keep stolen money out of Gittip. The secondary goal is to recover stolen money once it's inside of Gittip. There are other kinds of fraud to watch for but let's focus on this for now. If Gittip does nothing, then stolen money gets into Gittip, and some portion of that is reported to the banks, and Gittip gets hit with chargebacks. Chargebacks are financially onerous, and if Gittip gets too many of them then we'll lose our privileges with the banks altogether. Moreover, chargebacks take months to hit. It's neither economical nor efficient to use chargebacks as the primary signal for bad accounts. Therefore, I don't see a choice but to try to predict which accounts are going to inject stolen money into Gittip before it happens. Once stolen money is in Gittip, some of that goes to good accounts and some to bad. Either Gittip makes an effort to recover that money somehow, or we simply factor the entire stolen amount into our cost of doing business.