Remember, these are cash-based transactions!
No credit card fees, chargeback concerns, or
signing necessary!
Unfortunately, as is a reality with all financial services
(e.g. banks, credit cards, etc.), predators can use stolen
identities to create fraudulent accounts without a victim’s
knowledge. That’s why Dwolla requires numerous identification
and verification steps. A necessary byproduct of this kind of
fraud is bank-level reversals, “chargebacks” issued by the
institutions on behalf of the victim, not Dwolla.
Most all merchants are well aware of the problem, which is why
we’ve always had something in our terms of service about
chargebacks since Day One.
Moving beyond that, I'm also quite shocked at their reversing charges and then retroactively changing records. That seems like a fairly huge breach of trust, and yet Mt Gox confirms it ("the transactions just disappeared from the history at first, without any notice"). I think Dwolla needs to come clean about how the hell that happened, and what steps they've taken to ensure it can't happen again. I'm uncomfortable with a payments processor that thinks retroactive changes to statements could ever even possibly be okay, especially in a post-SOX world. I want to see some acknowledgement on their part that they've screwed the pooch, and that it won't happen again the next time their tinkering with their systems. That's not the sort of think a trustworthy company would try and sweep under the rug, in my book.