Ebay step up anti-fraud action
Many start-up (or up-start) web businesses from the nineties are a now a permanent fixture such as eBay, however the problem with these websites is that while they have connected plenty of buyers and sellers they have also helped out some crooks along the way.
President of AFI International Group Inc, Peter Martin, stated that crooks reselling stolen goods on auction websites are a huge problem because any company that has a product that can be re-sold can be struck by online fraud.
However, auction websites are not the only places that crooks head to as they are also increasingly using social media websites to sell their stolen wares according to Martin. He stated that with the growth of websites such as Facebook now social networks are giving sellers a large group of customers that they can reach and find.
Principal Cynthia Navarro from Finnegan?s Way said that eBay was designed to make it easy for buyers and sellers to find each other, not to stop fraud. Initially there were a ton of complaints, but according to Navarro over the years eBay has done a lot to counter the amount of fraudulent transactions that happen on the website.
As online web business has developed eBay has stepped forward to take the lead in combating online crime by implementing certain mechanisms that make it easier to prosecute and investigate criminal activity.
For example, the popular auction site has a program called VeRO which reports intellectual property right infringement directly to the proper authorities.
Ebay has also launched an outreach program called PROACT that is set up to help security and loss prevention managers create undercover accounts so that they can investigate possible leads that may lead them to thieves selling stolen items online.
