I think that with the Internet as the medium, everything happens more quickly. The business sets up more quickly. They change identities more quickly. I mean, you can throw up a new Web site in an hour. It just has moved things to kind of a warp speed. So you find that the life-span of one of these frauds is much shorter than might have been the case where the frauds turned out to rent office space, get phone lines, [and] do all of those sorts of things. We find more and more that these scams are operating out of homes. Noting that fraud over the Internet requires access to some form of payment system, just as every other kind of fraud does, Ms. Harrington urged consumers to pay for their online purchases by credit card. She explained that “consumers have important federal rights that protect them from being held liable for unauthorized and fraudulent transactions if they pay by credit card.” Susan Grant, Vice President for Public Policy of the National Consumers League (NCL) and Director of the NCL’s National Fraud Information Center and Internet Fraud Watch programs, testified as to why consumers must take extra care in cyberspace: I think that people sometimes get so excited about the novelty of the Internet that they lose sight of the same common sense that they would use if somebody knocked on their door in the middle of the night offering them something, and it was a stranger, or if they got a telephone call out of the blue from somebody that they didn’t know. There’s a lot of talk about community on the Internet as though it’s one big happy place with everybody dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and sharing information with each other, but in fact, just like any community, there are bad guys lurking in the alleyways. People need to be cautious. It’s no reason not to use the Internet. And actually, I think it’s ironic that, for instance, we see a decreasing amount of credit card use for payment compared to things like checks and money orders, and yet the credit card is the safest way to pay because of your legal dispute rights. I think that people may be so worried about giving their credit card information on the Net, even though with the encryption programs that are in place, it’s really, from what we can see, relatively safe. And they’re not sufficiently worried about who it is that they’re doing business with at the other end. Online auctions alone are expanding e-commerce rapidly. Gomez Advisors estimates that in 1999 online auctions connected 7.4 million buyers and sellers transferring goods worth $4.5 billion. The
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