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Then when too many of the fradulent payments get charged back then your payment processor drops you

Sure, chargebacks cost money.

You know what else costs money? When someone wants to give you money, and you misidentify them as a bot and refuse their money.

With donations being blocked you keep sitting at 0, with chargebacks you can actually go negative, in a potentially unbounded way.

I really hope that the sole reason that michaelt concluded this is simply due on not having any experience how to manage credit card payments (on merchant's side).

For those who does not handle these things: I am not sure on what processor Network Time Foundation is using, but Stripe's $15 fee is actually on the low side of chargebacks (some processors even use the fixed fee + percentage model). Worse, this is unconditional: if you somehow won this, you won't get the chargeback fee.

Yeah, but one probably costs more money then the other, and it seems plausible its the chargebacks.

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