And the free e-mail provider said it could do nothing without a search warrant. It's not just small-business owners who suffer from Internet fraud. The company never recovered the merchandise and was forced to pick up the bill, says Robert Shapiro, Casio's manager of legal affairs. But the experience was a rude awakening to some of the pitfalls that face merchants online. Credit card fraud on the Internet is a serious, largely unacknowledged problem.
Merchants bear the brunt of the responsibility for fraudulent credit card transactions online.
Not only can credit card companies do little to help them, the merchants say, but the firms also deny that e-commerce fraud is a problem at all. The Internet has gotten a bad rap. It has been portrayed as a place where anyone can take your credit card numbers. The reality is, the merchants are the ones who end up eating the costs of the fraud. We don't have a fraud problem.