The timetable, guarantees, etc. hold no relevance outside of a courtroom. Banks do not hold a trial before honoring a request to reverse a charge; they take the cardholder's word. Unless the merchant can provide a signature and proof of delivery of some item, they're not going to be able to dispute the chargeback either; the bank is leaving it up to the court system to resolve payment disputes outside of a few narrow circumstances. Nobody's going to take every funder that charges back a payment to court to prove they are not owed that refund, so in practice, everyone involved in crowdfunding has to deal with the fact that some of the money is going to disappear no matter what is written.

Credit Card Chargebacks. It's easier for a card company to agree with their customer who says "I paid for this thing on the internet and the company never delivered", than to dig into the details of a random crowd funded project, and read through any promises or lack thereof of deliverables, etc...

You're assuming no fraud at all exists on Indiegogo.

Someone could demand a refund because:

1) Their credit card was stolen and used to fund a project. They never agreed to the charge,they're entitled to a refund.

2) The project was fraudulent. The creators never intended to fund the project using the money. They ran off with it instead. Those people were deceived, and are entitled to a refund (in general, but also under the credit card associations rules).

Some potion of transaction on Indiegogo will be fraudulent. Paypal or Indiegogo must have a way of recovering that money.. if they don't then they will have to cover it themselves. That's the way it works. That's why payment processors create reserves for high-risk businesses.

Don't know where you are... but in the US, visa/mc/etc all protect their customers from fraud. In fact, in US law, consumers are not liable for more than $50 of a fraudulent charge on a credit card (and most banks reduce that to $0). So first, the consumer WILL get their money back because they have a contract that says they will in the case of fraud.

Your bank recoups that money from PayPal/indiegogos processor, and that processor will recoup the money from Indigogo, and indiegogo recoups it from the project. Whoever can't recover their money in that chain, is where it ends. That company is out of luck.

Saying, 'Oops.. we let one of our customers commit fraud, too bad for you'... isn't a permitted excuse.

And this applies to PayPal as well.. since consumers get their money into a PayPal account using a credit card or bank transfer. So PayPal is no different than any other processor in this case.

So you funded mailpile, and you want them to have your money. Seems cut and dry... but it's not.

If it's a credit card, you might not pay your debt. That's a risk borne by Visa and MC.

If it turns out to be a stolen card, all parties on the receiving end might be obligated to return the money. If Mailpile is honest, they will comply, but if Mailpile is responsible for the fraudulent payment, they just successfully laundered some stolen credit into their bank account.

Maybe they can't get the whole $100k in cash, so it's not realistic since AML says they can't have more than 10k at a time. I would be very suspicious if I was mailpile's bank and they came in to close the account tomorrow. But, I don't think that's how AML works.