Jason here, op (and CEO of Sift Science). It wasn't quite clear in the article - in the example of the stolen television, there is a key difference between Best Buy and bestbuy.com. In the latter, the merchant takes the hit on fraud (e.g. $1000 will be subtracted from the bank account of bestbuy.com), whereas in the former, the merchant is off the hook for fraud. This is one of the key differences between Card Present (offline) and Card Not Present (online) transactions.

I've contacted the reporter to try and clear this up.