Thus people who borrow irresponsibly (because it's expensive) on their credit card and pay back are rewarded with high scores, people who make judicious use of interest free credit are punished with low ones.That and the fact that several things that matter far much more to a landlord such as overall net worth and rental history are not measured but a ton of things that are irrelevant are. 

I would stipulate that anybody wishing to place a negative rating on a post will be required to provide a written explanation in the form of a post appended to the thread.As jawsette said in her post, if you do use the negative rating to impact somebody's influence score, then there should be some threshhold of negative votes that must be reached before that occurs.But my take is this: I'm not out to "punish" some person; I'm more inclined to not see some innocent viewer of a post (that should have a bad rating) get punished by following something that they could have been warned to avoid by the negative rating.Hope that clarifies and makes sense.PS.

Account Closed - I think losing your earnest money would be the least of your worries, especially if it is a FHA loan - this is what the penalties areMortgage fraud is a serious crime, and one punished by significant penalties.

If a person gets caught committing mortgage fraud / bank fraud, the punishment is a million dollar fine and 30 years in the pen.

The first is a patron, the last a punisher.

If a landlord is willing to meet the bare minimum by law/code without going above and beyond because that's the only way they can turn a profit, should they be punished for that or does that make them a subpar landlord?

If he is hurting people then I hope his is punished. 

Odds are you'll pay a bunch to a lawyer, get no where near enough in judgement/return (if you can even collect it), and only get personal gratification of "being right".My take on it is that like bullies - folks who lie, cheat and scam, will continue to do so until they're punitively punished.

WA just passed a bill making it a civil offense, punishable with a $500 fine for basically falsifying that an animal is a service animal of some sort when it is not. 

Reward and punishment superresponses play roles in so many of our interactions that we don't realize.