Hypothesis alert!  (These kinds of ideas hit me when I am in the shower somehow and I just got out.)

Two things seem particularly mysterious about this issue:

1) Dwolla's silence and unwillingness to communicate with Tradehill for no understandable reason.

2) The seemingly disproportionate effect on TH vs. all other exchanges.

The idea which hit me is that for the last decade or so 'national security letters' have been being used like confetti (in the US.)  An interesting feature of these is that complete silence on the part of the involved parties is demanded and usually obtained.  So, for example, the NSA can not only walk into a library and demand their checkout list, but also compel the Librarians to not utter a word about it.  (A few years ago Librarians 'struck' and destroyed all of their records in disgust as I recall.)

So, I wonder if Tradehill is the target of a national security investigation?  It was not to long ago that certain congressmen were making noise along these lines about Bitcoin generally, and Tradehill seems to me like it could be a high-value target.

Part II of my hypothesis is that TH may have been being specifically set up and hence the disproportionate malfeasance that they seem to have encountered.

This is sad.

I've always been a little skeptic about escrowed exchanges. I realize their importance to most people, particularly large business who just can't afford to evaluate the trustworthiness of every individual they exchange currency with. But the thing is that they need to have a public link to the current banking system, and that makes them vulnerable to all sorts of issues, including what we're seeing here.

I think the best way out for them now, besides using irreversible means of payment like Liberty Reserve (actually, does it remain irreversible?), is to try to hire insurances. That would make everything more expensive, but that's the cost of the banking system, if you want to use an escrowed exchange you'll have to pay for it.
I wonder though if it they would manage to find any company offering insurances to something as peculiar as bitcoin exchanges at an affordable price.

Where's that CoinPal guy now? He had a robust fraud prevention system. Couldn't the same techniques be applied to credit card or bank transfers?

That's big. It could possibly mean that Dwolla simply doesn't have the resources to take these frauds on their balance sheet. That's probably why they are silent: they know they should refund you, but they just can't.

Maybe you'll have no other option but suing them.

http://agoristradio.com/?p=438

listen to this very interesting Agorist Radio podcast History of the Cypherpunks.

its been a coupla months since i listened to it but a central point from the panel discussion was that banks LIKE chargebacks b/c it gives them an excuse to charge higher fees.

in Dwolla's case, in order for them to survive IMO the only choice is for them to charge more.  i've never understood how they could make money at $0.25 per tx.

This could mean that some exchanges no longer have the funds to cover all their liabilities, and are now operating on a "fractional reserve" model where they just hope everybody won't withdraw their money all at once. Kinda scary.

This is why I try not to leave any more money than I have to on the exchanges. There is nobody looking over their shoulder to make sure they aren't making big loans to themselves, writing off big losses, etc, all while naively intending to pay the money back "someday, with our future profits"

Just hold all dwolla deposit for 60 days before the fund is allowed to be used for trading from now on

but it's my money, and i want it NOW.

What other option is there for funding with a $0.25 fee? I'd take the 60 days rather than no funding options at all.

For emergency trade, sure I can wire the money and pay the fee. But like my stock brokerage account, I usually keep money in there for years and don't deposit and withdrawal constantly, 60 days isn't a big deal to me, it's just an option to fund cheaply.