The FTC announced this week that the agency and its counterparts in twelve other countries have reached an agreement to collect and share complaints about cross-border e-commerce transactions. FTC officials say they hope the new venture will help improve their ability to tackle fraud that occurs between customers and sellers in different countries. The participating countries include Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
As part of the project, the FTC has launched a new Web site--available in English, German, French and Spanish--where consumers from the 13 countries involved can file complaints, as well as get information about Internet fraud and the consumer protection authorities in their country. The participating countries also will be able to share confidential information on a private site already being operated by the FTC.
In the United States alone, Internet fraud complaints to the FTC have dramatically increased as e-commerce has grown. The number of complaints about Internet fraud grew from 1,000 in 1997 to 25,000 in 2000, according to written testimony put before the US Senate Finance Committee earlier this month by Hugh Stevenson, associate director of the Division of Planning and Information in the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection.
Among the most frequent types of complaints reported to the FTC include Internet auction fraud, pyramid schemes, travel and vacation scams and unauthorised charges applied to credit cards from Web sites that provide adult content.
"The Internet offers consumers access to goods, services and information from around the world," FTC Chairman Robert Pitofsky said in a statement. "But the borderless nature of the marketplace can also frustrate governments' ability to protect consumers."
