E‐Fraud: Current Trends and International Developments Available to Purchase

When Peter Steiner published his famous cartoon in The New Yorker in July 1993 with the renowned caption ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog’, he succeeded in coining within a single cartoon strip the core cause of a multitude of problems that e‐businesses face today. The new communications technologies allow almost anyone to have the ability to deceitfully pass oneself off as someone worthy of trust and reliability for the purpose of personal gain. Conversely, proving or disproving one's trustworthiness to strangers online without specific technologies like public key infrastructure and digital signatures is a near fruitless exercise. While such security technologies are able to resolve identity issues, it has proven to be both difficult and expensive to implement them successfully.