Countering Digital Deception – Gregory M. Dickinson

Modern online businesses thrive by responding to customer needs at an individual level.

Data-driven advertising campaigns can be fine-tuned to such precise audiences that they have become a powerful tool for online trickery.

Scammers now stalk and target their victims with expert precision.

FTC has resources to pursue only a tiny fraction of potential claims— a few dozen out of the hundreds of thousands of online fraud reports each year .

Low-cost digital deception has outstripped existing enforcement resources, authors say.

Deceptive online practices are prohibited not only by the federal FTC Act , but by state consumer-protection laws.

But procedural challenges to private litigation sometimes allow online scammers to avoid the private lawsuits that could otherwise act as a check on online fraud.

The patterns of deception that often stymy private lawsuits are less resistant to government enforcement.

The primary obstacles to private litigation against scammers are, recall, defendants located in foreign jurisdictions.

The FTC should focus its efforts disproportionately on small-scale but widespread schemes, particularly those by entities whose consumer contracts include arbitration clauses.