Maybe, maybe not, but this is a very simplistic way of looking at it. If credit card fraud is responsible for X% of total charges, they can spend effort to deal with it, OR they can simply not deal with it and keeping the transactions going while eating the cost, they may be able to serve Y% more customers where Y > X and thus end up with more profit in the long run.
This works for a lot of businesses in America because the sheer scale is massive (take McDonalds for example, they would probably be better off processing their lunch rush quickly due to the margins they are making rather than take even 1 second to verify there is no fraud). This may not work in Europe, but IMO you're missing an entire dimension when analyzing the true costs.
If the fraud/benefit scale ever tipped away from favoring the companies, I think we would see all these major fraud prevention mechanisms kick in almost immediately in the US.