ABSTRACT
The previous chapter described many techniques that could be used in reducing the opportunity for crime in the e-commerce environment. It did not, however, address perhaps the most important issue: who will apply these techniques, and how will they be implemented? We propose in this chapter to answer this question by identifying (a) the mechanisms of policing that operate in the e-commerce environment, and (b) the social organisations that support and apply these mechanisms. By mechanisms of policing we mean any element, whether physical, social or cultural, that serves to control the behaviour of individuals and groups with the effect of reducing or preventing crime – in other words, what sociologists call social control. To prepare the groundwork for this analysis we will present the case of the successful reduction in credit card fraud in the UK, since it contains both the broad and narrow approaches of situational crime prevention and concerns the prototypical online payment system that dates back some 30 years. In presenting this case we will detail the situations that make credit card fraud possible – an extension of the analysis we began in Chapter 5 concerning the risks of online payment systems. We will see that the identification of the specific situations that make credit card fraud possible – the narrow approach of situational prevention – naturally leads to the mechanisms needed to control them. And these in turn point to the organisations and individuals needed to contribute to the modification or elimination of these situations.
