Maybe your credit card number was stolen without your knowledge and they took care of it for you without you even being aware

That would be whoever made the cards fault. We don't give credit for cleaning up your own mess, that's the minimum standard for engaging in a beneficial relationship.

It's not a value proposition from gmail that you can't access my inbox just from knowing my address.

I can't believe you can be a $400B company and the value comes from stopping fraud that you enabled by your own product design.

Much of the fraud is merchants defrauding their customers.

Nah.

They took care of it for themselves, when someone commits fraud it isn't your problem because they used your name to do it.

Imagine if you were defrauded for a few hundred bucks by someone claiming to be a big celebrity. You probably wouldn't even be able to get into contact with the actual person, let alone have them jump through a bunch of hoops, spend time on hold with your staff or go to the post office to send you copies of documents. They wouldn't bother to respond to you, they have no obligation to, whatever happened had nothing to do with them.

Countering your own anecdata with my own, I have. To the tune of $5,000+.

I've used banks and cards to help resolve fraud. Rarely, but I love it.

And now the bank pushed me to use Zelle - which has zero protection.

To be fair, the trade-off is that there aren't any fees and it's nearly instantaneous. For the type of transaction similar to handing someone you know a wad of cash, it seems pretty good.

> [...] bank pushed me to use Zelle - which has zero protection.

Also channeling patio11 [1]: This is actually a pretty interesting ongoing experiment as to whether banks can opt out of Regulation E.

[1] https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1500993875627761666

No kidding. Zelle looks so dangerous from consumer point of view. It is so easy to get scammed and almost impossible to be made whole. I am fine with Zelle if banking regulators require Reg E. The best part of Reg E: Since banks are almost completely responsible for fraud in their customers named, they take it very seriously!

"I have never been owned by another person, so there is no need for a law against slavery."

The world is full of services, valuable, difficult to provide services, that a given person will never consume. Doesn't mean no one else does.

> I have been paying and being paid for decades now, and I have never involved a payment processor in a dispute I had with the other side.

Have you considered that the possibility of disputes and the existence of a framework for resolving them is part of the reason for that?

But is paying 2-3% on each transaction worth it for that?

Dispute resolution is not where the 2-3% go (as evidenced by disputes also existing on US debit cards, where it's 0.05%, and EU credit and debit cards, where it's 0.3% and 0.2% respectively).

Some of it is spent by the issuer on fraud expenses that they are assigned liability for, but given the same reasoning as above, if that was more than 0.05%, there wouldn't be any profitable debit issuers left in the US (and similarly for the EU, although the regulator is changing the fraud calculus there significantly by enforcing strong cardholder authentication, so it's not an apples to apples comparison).

In other words, if there was political will to get rid of credit card points in the US, we could have all of this for much cheaper. (We might need to look into scheme fees too while we're at it, e.g. by finding a market solution that creates actual competition there.)

You might be surprised how often those disputes are used (and abused), then.