> A company making any effort to be legitimate should use one of the several identity verification services available in combination with any sort of nontrivial fraud detection, which should easily dissuade 99.9% of thieves.

Not so. Thieves aren't stupid. They try a few times to figure out the system, then steal the identity of someone else (who is legit and passes fraud and credit checks) to do the actual theft.

The portability of the gear, combined with it's high resale value, means rentals will never work for an online business.

While this is certainly true for a few thieves, at least for other high-fraud industries, it's a case of running away from a bear - you just have to be harder to defraud then the other guy (in this case, other online marketplaces). Additionally, it's both more difficult to obtain an identity (particularly if locality is required to pass fraud checks) (whereas stolen CCs can easily be purchased in bulk) and not necessarily sufficient - for example, if the fraudster's contact number is verified against their identity, it again increases the threshold.

If the thieves have access to a local, legit person's CC, identity, and phone, then yes, you can't really stop them from stealing.

TransferWise once requested a webcam interview and verified my ID using that.

How can a a theif fake an interview?

>This is not an excuse.

It's not supposed to be an excuse for anything. The GP asked why they didn't take a deposit and my response was to argue why that's pointless.

Which is why they should be sued out of existence.