Also, if fraud is a cost of doing business, then that society is going to start wasting a lot of resources and be less productive than societies with less fraud.
I wonder why they keep those stores open sometimes.
I used to live in SF and would see shoplifting all the time but now live in NYC and haven’t seen it that much.
I never worked retail myself, but I've heard plenty of stories from people who do.
One person I knew called it "taking out the trash". They would fill trash bags with cds. He had a room full of unopened ones.
You can cheaply discourage someone from robbing you and instead rob someone else. But 0 nationwide would be vastly more expensive.
I'm not asking for sympathy here, I'm explaining why it's a free for all. It would be fairly easy for the credit card companies to aggregate the data and revoke cards from these people (when there's a pattern) because they have that visibility. Or, if revocation is too hard, give me back a "return fraud risk score" when I do a pre-auth....even if said score has a very high threshold before it shows. But they have no reason to, because it doesn't hurt them in any way.
I'm actually surprised businesses don't do it more often as a deterrent. At a minimum, they could go win a few easy cases, then tell future customers threatening chargebacks about those cases and the outcome.
They could send a simple letter saying "We see you have initiated a chargeback against us. After investigation, we believe this chargeback not to have any merit. In cases of false chargebacks, it is our policy to take clients to court to reclaim our costs, which in past cases have averaged $X on top of the value of the goods.".