Money transfer systems are different. They draw a lot of dark, evil forces that try not just to hack their systems, but to game and abuse it through normal operations.
It's unfortunate that legitimate businesses get caught in the crossfire sometimes, but we rarely hear about how many credit card thieves PayPal's system rightful stops. (Answer: It's a lot.)
How do you know it is a lot if we rarely hear about it?
There are people (individuals, and entire enterprises) dedicated to financial shenanigans of the black hat variety. If Paypal didn't have a robust risk prevention system, they'd have been annihilated a long time ago.
In fact, I often spot fraudulent charges very quickly and have to email my third part processor to refund or cancel the payments.
I was pointed to http://maxmind.com by another HN poster, which is an API that'll give you a probability of a charge being fraudulent so you can verify it before passing it to the payment provider. I'm going to test that out in combination with Stripe.
I'd definitely be interested in seeing a write-up about integrating Stripe with third-party fraud detection systems.
The specific numbers are privileged, but suffice it to say, I'm very confident that PayPal deals with as much, if not more fraud, than the mind-boggling amounts I saw at that job.
Yes, that's not ideal for you as the merchant. Welcome to being a merchant. Shrinkage exists.
I wonder if other Elon Musk's creations (SpaceX and Tesla) will become something like this after he will sell them.
Overall I think SpaceX is his baby. Based on interviews and what i've generally read about the man, I think he's gonna stick with it for the long run. I mean hell, he wants to go to Mars as soon as possible in one of his own rockets. That's a dedicated man.
Also, fraudsters tend to not brag about how much fraud they weren't able to process.